Even the Buffalo-bound passengers won't be leaving the cocoon of cool once they board. JetBlue flight attendants will wear outfits that look like they walked straight off a different sort of runway: Neeleman has hired Stan Herman, president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, to work up midnight-blue, Prada-esque uniforms -- that is, when Herman's not designing some spiffier outfits for Amtrak and McDonald's (his other gigs at the moment). The burly ground crew will wear silver bomber jackets and cargo pants that wouldn't seem out of place at the Mercer Kitchen. "What you want to do is catch the perfume of an airline," says Herman.

JetBlue is turning out to be something of a laboratory experiment in contemporary branding. "So many new entrants have come and gone based on 'We're going to have low fares, and that's going to be it,' " says Gareth Edmondson-Jones, one of three key marketing executives hired by JetBlue to develop its identity. "Low fares will get them on, but you've got to enjoy it, especially in the New York market. Look at Starbucks. We're built on the same principle: Brands these days get emotional commitment, not just financial commitment. What you buy says something about you. You buy it because you like that badge."

He beams proudly.

"We're going to be the Starbucks of the sky."

Neeleman does have the same aggressively expansionist tendencies of Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, and he certainly shares Schultz's bottomless energy, bouncing from place to place like a stray electron. But Neeleman can also come off a bit distant, a touch self-absorbed: Try to engage him in conversation, and you know he's not going to loan you his attention for long.

Neeleman "has a definite Silicon Valley style," says one analyst, "creating the same pre-IPO buzz you get at a dot-com."

On the flight, Neeleman briefly lands in one of the many empty aisle seats and offers up an unexpected story:

"My neighbor called me the other day and she said, 'You have an interesting little boy.' Turns out, the other day, she asked my son Daniel what he wanted for Christmas. And he said, 'I want some stock.'

" 'Stock?' she said. 'Don't you want video games or anything?' 'Nope. I just want stock. JetBlue stock,' he told her." Neeleman laughs proudly -- never mind that JetBlue is several thousand miles away from the IPO stage.

Neeleman was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1960, the son of United Press International's bureau chief. The family returned to Utah when he was 5. Neeleman was a handful, clearly bright but a window-gazer who constantly fell behind on his lessons. His third-grade teacher told his mother that he could be "tremendously successful when he grows up -- if he hires himself an assistant."

The problems followed him to the University of Utah, where he eventually dropped out and went back to Brazil as a Mormon missionary. To this day, Neeleman is observant, but not doctrinaire: JetBlue does serve liquor, and Neeleman bristles slightly when polygamy comes up in conversation -- he thinks it makes the Latter-Day Saints seem a bit kooky. Neeleman will drink Coca-Cola and use mild profanity, tossing off phrases like "bullcrap" and "swinging dicks," even if they do catch in his throat a bit.

In 1984, Neeleman interviewed for a job with an ambitious Salt Lake City travel agent named June Morris. He was a college dropout and most recently had failed to get a travel agency of his own off the ground. Still, plainspoken Morris was drawn to the 24-year-old effervescing with ideas, hiring him to help thriving Morris Travel expand its leisure-travel arm. "When he walked into a room, the energy level went up," Morris recalls.

It wasn't long before Neeleman had sold Morris on the idea of starting a charter airline: Morris's operation would buy seats in bulk on charters to Hawaii and Mexico, then fill them by offering discount packages. The gamble paid off: The charter business was soon spun off into a more traditional low-cost airline, and by 1993, Morris Air was a highly respected low-cost competitor to Southwest, serving 22 cities, from Spokane to Atlanta. Neeleman's penchant for technological innovation quickly became apparent: In 1993, he introduced electronic ticketing to the airline industry.

Like Southwest before it, Morris Air successfully targeted the baseball-capped Wal-Mart demographic that rarely flew anywhere but could be lured off a Greyhound if the price was right. Morris Air filled planes to a much greater capacity than most airlines and cut costs everywhere possible -- issuing reusable plastic boarding passes, for example.

There was much cause for celebration during those Cinderella years. "Whenever we had a bit of good news, David would jump up and touch the ceiling," recalls Morris, now retired. "In fact, I've always told him I was going to blackmail him one day about this: We hired a ballet instructor to teach David and three other executives a dance from Swan Lake to perform at the office Christmas party one year." Neeleman happily threw on a tutu. "He was very enthusiastic, jumping and doing his pirouettes -- he could really do those dances," Morris says, laughing.