This weekend was my first “real” JetBlue experience, discounting a quick hop from New York to Boston last year.  It’s not bad!  Let’s analyze some particulars.

First, in-flight DirecTV is a fantastic invention.  I did enjoy that the Travel channel remained “unavailable” for the whole flight (while everything else worked perfectly), as if to say, “You’re already on an airplane at 37,000 feet.  Just how much more travel would you like to be experiencing at this particular moment?”

I did not enjoy, however, the mandatory, unavoidable advertisement they play at takeoff describing how awesome DirecTV is.  If, hypothetically, the plane had just been sitting on the tarmac at JFK for 45 minutes, with one of its passengers happily watching Mythbusters, that passenger would be annoyed to have the ad kick in at the precise moment the Mythbusters were about to drop a car from a helicopter 4,000 feet in the air while racing another car at top speed across the desert toward the drop site.  In fact, that would be phenomenally terrible timing.

Second, although JetBlue does not include at-seat power ports for those of us with laptops and iPods, I appreciate that they do have a standard 110 volt AC outlet in the lavatory, for passengers who need to curl their hair or shave in preparation for landing (I imagine).

Finally, they seem to place particular emphasis on crew friendliness, based on the questions in their customer satisfaction survey.  One asks (I paraphrase), ‘Was the pilot professional and humorous?’  Oddly, yes!

Well, folks, some of you may have noticed that the sun has moved over to the other side of the plane, and that’s never a good sign.

Then, after we experienced the third largest jolt I’ve ever felt on an airplane:

Uhh, sorry about that bump, folks; that was just a little wake turbulence from another aircraft passing in front of us.  It’s pretty common around JFK; nothing to worry about.

The woman in front of me looked pretty worried anyway.  And if anyone’s keeping score, we still got the mandatory Airline Pilot Weather Report.

In the end, they did well enough to get me back on a few flights with their experimental All You Can Jet pass.