Transportation

David Neeleman would go to bed each night clutching a piece of coal if he could. The airline entrepreneur says he needs the black soot to pull his $1.7 billion company out of the red.

Neeleman, the founder, president and chief executive officer of JetBlue Airways Corporation, is expected to formally announce a $10 raise in ticket prices tomorrow, in the wake of high fuel costs that caused turbulence for the low-fare passenger airline last quarter. A fare increase is expected to restore the company’s recent unexpected financial plunge.

The three-time entrepreneur demonstrated his well-known optimistic and amiable management style yesterday at the Second Annual Burton Kossoff Business Leadership Lecture Series at Baruch College, a business school located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

“I grew up thinking I was not intelligent,” Neeleman told an overflowing lecture hall of 350 students and business professionals. “I didn’t do well scholastically. But I realized I wasn’t stupid. I just think differently than everyone else.”

JetBlue lost $20.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2005. But the CEO, who is known for walking the aisles and shaking hands aboard any one of the company’s 96 aircrafts, is not cutting jobs, salaries or benefits from his 17,000 employees. In fact, he shares 17 percent of the company’s revenue with JetBlue workers.

Instead of scaling back on costs, Neeleman said he is investing in methanol research. Methanol is fuel made from coal and while it has less energy per gallon than both ethanol – the corn-based fuel touted by President George Bush in his State of the Union address – it is also significantly less expensive.

“We should be able to make fuel out of coal,” said Neeleman, who blames high oil prices, the Florida hurricanes and Hurricane Katrina for the airline’s financial woes. “People are figuring out a way to do it right now.”

JetBlue’s 20 million loyal fliers are unlikely to not mind dishing out a little extra pocket change for their one-class, reputable in-flight service that situates each passenger in leather seats and provides free DIRECTV to 30 direct-flight destinations. The airline went airborne in 2000 and prides itself on its service.

Neeleman told how a committed customer recently sent him a $100 check in the mail offering his support for the upset airline.

“I sent the check back and told him to buy a plane ticket with it,” Neeleman said.

But that is not the only money Neeleman has been offered or personally handed in JetBlue terminals across America. His gesture to decline contributions is just another example of how the successful entrepreneur hasn’t been afraid to fail.

“Often, success grows from failure,” he said, with the attitude many entrepreneurs have after investing and failing in multiple business ventures. “Getting fired from Southwest Airlines was the best thing that ever happened to me,” said Neeleman, who had served in an executive position at that airline.

After leaving Southwest, he realized he had a drive to do it again – and do it better.

Marilyn Kahn, director of executive on campus programs, who selects the Lecture Series’ annual guest speaker, said she invited the airline executive because “We look for an individual leader who has a story to tell.

“Neeleman was a perfect fit who came [with] good timing,” she added.

A man of many stories, Neeleman said there is no secret to entrepreneurship. Some people are “just wired that way,” he said.

The lecture series is named after Burton Kossoff, an honored 1946 graduate of Baruch College, who founded his own packing business, Burton Packaging Co. Inc., in 1949. He ran the company for 50 years before melanoma took his life.

“I think he credited Baruch College for his inspiration and success in New York City,” said his widow, Phyllis Kossoff.