JetBlue Announces Nov. Start For Florida Flights (With Video)
Rick Saia
Jetblue officials disembark a plane today at Worcester Regional Airport, where the airline plans to offer Florida flights starting in November.
JetBlue Airways will offer flights from Worcester to Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, Fla., starting Nov. 7, it announced today at an event at the airport full of pomp and circumstance.
Today's event at Worcester Regional Airport featured blue decorations and a JetBlue plane carrying CEO David Barger, Gov. Deval Patrick and Lt. Gov. Timothy Murray landing in front of a crowd while a marching band made up of students from Worcester South High School and College of the Holy Cross played.
The carrier will start service from Worcester with one daily flight to each destination, the airline said. JetBlue will fly 100-seat Embraer 190 aircraft out of the city. The airline is offering a promotional ticket price of $60 one way through April 10, with blackout dates.
"The enthusiasm of the Worcester community and the warm reception with which we've been met has been tremendous," Barger said in a statement distributed by The Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport), which oversees the airport. "We look forward to a long relationship with the city of Worcester and to future growth in this region."
Part of the warm reception for JetBlue is an incentive package from Massport. It has awarded JetBlue $150,000 for marketing and about $275,000 in fee rebates. The agency said the program will help the airport be competitive with others in the region and noted it has a similar program in place to attract select international flights to Logan International in Boston.
Massport recently announced it would move ahead with a parallel taxiway and installation of a Category III instrument landing system at the airport – which has an estimated cost of $35 million. The agency said those improvements will make the airport safer and allow for long-term growth. U.S. Rep. James McGovern of Worcester said it's unclear when the system will be operational at the airport, but Massport spokesman Richard Walsh said it would not happen before JetBlue begins flying out of Worcester in seven months.
Before an enthusiastic crowd inside the airport's boarding this morning, Barger lauded the support and enthusiasm of educational, business and civic leaders in the Worcester area, as well as the city and state officials who have been wooing the airline over the past year to restore commercial passenger traffic to the airport. "I've never seen this kind of turnout and the support we've seen in this community," he said.
Barger also recalled receiving a phone call from U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who, after visiting the city last year, told the JetBlue CEO: "You really have to take a hard look at Central Massachusetts with Worcester."
Worcester has been without a commercial passenger carrier since March 2012, when Direct Air folded. Officials later turned to JetBlue – which already flies out of Logan, as well as T.F. Green in Rhode Island and Bradley International in Connecticut – as a possible replacement. That process also inspired an online video contest last summer in which area residents added their voices to those effortsIn response, JetBlue produced a video thanking residents for their interest. It featured airline employees mispronouncing the city's name and said the airline had more work to do.
Today, a new video was released saying they had been practicing their pronunciation and showing employees getting it, mostly, right.
Jet Blue flies to 33 destinations out of Logan. It also flies to Fort Lauderdale and Orlando out of T.F. Green, in Warwick, R.I., and Bradley, just north of Hartford, Conn. Worcester will become the 80th destination for the carrier.
Murray, speaking at the podium this morning at the airport, said "We are making Worcester and Central Massachusetts better," adding that the site "will be even more important going forward."
"This is a good day for the commonwealth and for Central Massachusetts," said Patrick, who touted the JetBlue decision as part of his economic growth strategy. "Airports and airlines grow jobs and spur economic opportunity in our cities."
McGovern called today's announcement "a victory for the region" and a "major boost to our Central Massachusetts economy."
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