But this is no half-baked sequel to People Express, the cattle-car carrier famous for proletarian airfares and equally proletarian service. JetBlue will essentially be wheeling onto the tarmac as the Southwest of the Northeast. Like Southwest, JetBlue is flying new planes of a single aircraft type and will be trying to keep more of its planes in the air for more hours every day than traditional airlines manage to. And like Southwest, JetBlue could care less about Saturday stay-overs. A dream team of managers includes president Dave Barger, an ex-Continental executive, and chief financial officer John Owen, late of Southwest.

"Let's put it this way," Murphy says. "Southwest Airlines has been the most successful airline in the country over the last twenty years. JetBlue has observed Southwest very carefully."

But JetBlue hopes to do it better, at least in New York. Southwest tends to fly out of secondary airports, like MacArthur on Long Island. JetBlue has landed Kennedy, the equivalent of playing Yankee Stadium. Of course, other low-fare carriers, like Tower Air, call JFK home. But Tower focuses on a few long-haul destinations: Los Angeles, Miami, Paris. Until JetBlue, there was no low-fare airline whose focus would be the whole of New York state and the greater East Coast.

JetBlue will exploit the same trends in air travel that have given rise to as many as ten other new low-cost carriers around the country -- mostly tiny prairie-jumpers like Minneapolis-headquartered Sun Country Airlines. A striking 30 percent of Americans who flew last year booked their tickets on low-cost carriers. But until now, the cheapo-air-travel boom had left the New York area cold. People Express died in 1987, a victim of its own 747-size ambitions to grow into a major international carrier. A few months ago, the feel-good story that was Kiwi Airlines -- founded at Newark airport by a legion of downsized airline employees -- collapsed amid allegations of safety violations and mismanagement.

All the competition from pesky little short-hop airlines has forced the big airlines to keep up with bare-bones carriers of their own, like US Airways' MetroJet or Delta Express. Problem is, these no-frill planes are "creating a whole new class of disenfranchised frequent travelers," says airline consultant Stuart Klaskin, of Miami-based Klaskin, Kushner & Co. "Business travelers who can't afford to travel in the front of the plane resent getting stuck in the back in extreme economy class. JetBlue will appeal to this traveler."

High fares have also had a predictably dampening effect here. At one point in the middle Reagan years, the three New York-area airports accounted for nearly 10 percent of the total domestic "enplanement" (airline-ese for boarding a commercial plane). Today, they account for a little more than 5 percent -- this at a time when domestic air travel in general has rocketed by more than 250 million passengers annually since 1984.

"I'll help you get slots at Kennedy," said Chuck Schumer, "but only if you fly to upstate New York."

Senator Charles Schumer says the issue of airfare-gouging repeatedly cropped up on last year's campaign trail. "I was looking at why upstate New York was not gaining jobs the way the rest of America was," Schumer says. "After interviewing companies and people all over, I found that miserable air service was one of the reasons. I saw it myself: When you run for office, you have to fly to Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany. You call up, and they charge an outlandish fee for a round-trip ticket. You'd think by paying $600 or $700 for a ticket, you'd be getting a beautiful plane, a beautiful seat. Instead, you'd get to the airport, and you were at the tail end of some terminal. Then, they made you walk downstairs onto the tarmac to a little propeller plane. On a nice day, they gave you peanuts."

The problem, Schumer says, dates back to 1978, when the federal government deregulated the airline industry, making it easier for start-ups to take on the big boys.

"Four airports were exempted from deregulation: the two New York City airports, O'Hare in Chicago, and National in Washington, D.C.," Schumer says. "No discount airline was going to fly in a major way unless they could fly into one of those major airports."

What an entrepreneur like Neeleman needed was someone who would help him break the majors' stranglehold at the local airports and get him a fair share of "slots" -- the crucial federal takeoff and landing approvals. "Three weeks after I won the Senate race, one of the first meetings I had was with David," Schumer recalls. "Immediately I said, 'This guy can do it. He's for real.' Basically, at that breakfast, I said, I'll help you get slots at Kennedy, but only if you fly to upstate New York."

And so on February 17, JetBlue will make its first flight upstate, to Buffalo. In Neeleman's eyes, New York is a yawning chasm of opportunity. "It's No. 1 in retail sales," says Neeleman. "You have this large population that makes a lot of money per capita, and everyone in New York would like to get out. At the same time, everyone outside New York would like to come in. It's truly the nirvana of all markets."

The Internet-age vibe that Neeleman exudes goes beyond his casual-Friday wardrobe. The same way Amazon's Jeff Bezos undercuts established bookstores by cutting out brick-and-mortar costs, Neeleman will undercut the biggies.

His decision to buy brand-new aircraft is just efficiency in disguise: A classic low-cost carrier like AirTran (known as ValuJet before the 1996 Florida Everglades crash) initially saved money by purchasing used DC-9s and 737s discarded by Delta and others. "But old planes are unreliable," says Neeleman, "and when they break down, you have to put all those passengers on another flight or airline. From a strictly dollars-and-cents perspective, it's cheaper to fly brand-new airplanes."

Leather seats cost twice as much, "but they last twice as long," says Neeleman. Flight attendants -- not hired custodians -- will clean the planes between flights. Recently, JetBlue advertised for flight attendants in the classified section of the Village Voice. "We've always said that we hope to get most of our front-line people out of college or out of some other industry," Neeleman says. "We want all the people who went to school at, say, Tulane -- who want to spend a couple of years in Manhattan, enjoy it, then go on to their next career or whatever. Career flight attendants aren't necessarily what we're after." (Of course, career flight attendants tend to ask for a lot more pay than kids straight out of Tulane.)

To save on staffing, the airline will provide a host of incentives -- perhaps a waived fee for the TV service -- to prompt more passengers to use the Website for ticketing and the automated toll-free number. In its first week of reservations, Neeleman says, JetBlue was booking 20 percent of its tickets electronically, more than twice the standard rate for most airlines.

Neeleman insists that none of his little "efficiency squeezes" (as management-consultants say) will be obvious. "If people are enjoying their airline experience, they're going to come back," he says. "If they want more chips, more soda, give it to them! Give them the whole can! It's only a few cents' difference."

JetBlue will have kiosks at the ticket counter where you will actually choose your seat yourself via touch-screen computer. Eventually, JetBlue's computers will even help you check your bags, asking if you packed them yourself. "When was the last time you went to a bank teller to get money?" Neeleman asks. "Why would you ever do that when you've tried the ATM even once? What we're really saying to the consumer is, 'Okay, what is it you hate about traveling?' 'Well, I hate standing on lines.' And I'm saying 'Let's try to eliminate lines.' "

If that's the case, then what about the main route to Kennedy, the parking lot also known as the Van Wyck Expressway? Neeleman says he's trying to address that. "The good thing about the Van Wyck," he says chipperly (and somewhat absurdly), "is that it's always backed up, so there are never any accidents, and it's always moving."

One plan is for a JetBlue shuttle that will bring passengers from the Jamaica subway station to the curb of JetBlue's terminal. The airline is also placing a lot of faith in the Port Authority's $1.5 billion light-rail trains now under construction that will leave from the Jamaica Center and Howard Beach subway stops; they're supposed to be finished in 2003. The primary elevated line will run up the Van Wyck's median to JFK, where it will loop around the airport. It's not exactly London's super-convenient Heathrow Express, but driving out to Islip at rush hour on a Friday is no 100-meter dash, either. All in all, some $9 billion in improvements -- including new roadways and several new terminals -- are slated for Kennedy in coming years. Donna Karan is planning a DKNY boutique there, too.