Object of the Week
This Is Secretly the Perfect Time to Launch a New Airline
After more than a year of travel being ground to a halt, timing is everything
Object of the Week is a column exploring the objects a culture obsesses over and what that reveals about us.
A year deep into a deadly pandemic that crippled the travel industry — U.S. passenger traffic is down by half — does not sound like the best time for a startup airline to take delivery of 60 brand-new planes.
But maybe that assumption is wrong. Maybe, in fact, a few dozen crisp new jets, painted in snazzy metallic blues, are a perfect physical symbol for a category that seems, surprisingly, poised to take off again.
The soon-to-launch airline is called Breeze Airways, a budget carrier based in Salt Lake City and founded by David Neeleman, an industry vet famous for launching then-innovator JetBlue more than two decades ago. Breeze has been in the works since 2018, and was still code-named Moxy when it announced two years ago that it had ordered a batch of Airbus A220 aircraft. By February of 2020, the total order was pegged at 60 planes, to be delivered in a little over a year.
