Todd Burke, JetBlue's VP of corporate communications, says it may be a long time before he looks fondly upon the Valentine's Day holiday. That was the day, in early 2007, when the airline experienced an operational crisis and set off a media firestorm that could drive any PR pro to the funny farm.

With a PR team of six at the airline's Forest Hills, N.Y. headquarters, Burke felt prepared to manage typical airline crises, like crashes--he's spent more than 20 years in airline PR. As tragic and dramatic as they are, he explains, crashes are a single incident, after which the PR team can move ahead with communicating the organization's messages.

Unfortunately, the plan to get JetBlue back on its feet failed in the days following Feb. 14 as flights were scheduled, then cancelled, and scheduled and cancelled some more (more than 1,700 flights were scratched through Feb. 19).The media closely followed the rising tide of complaints and the chaos at the airline's airport gates, as JetBlue became the biggest news story of the week.

Behind the scenes, the PR team was hustling to respond to the flood of inbound media calls, and to also use e-mail and social media to reach out to all passengers, even if they hadn't been personally inconvenienced by the flight cancellations. The PR team issued seven press releases between Feb. 14 and 20, mostly about the status of cancellations, and how passengers could go about rebooking cancelled flights.

In addition, "we let [then-CEO] David Neeleman do any interview that was requested," Burke explains, in an effort to show that the executive and his company weren't hiding in locked rooms, and were aware of the suffering caused by the cancellations. Neeleman's choice of words--for instance, explaining to The New York Times that he was "humiliated and mortified" by the crisis--got big play.

The sincerity of the language, and Neeleman's obvious anguish, both impressed the media and the industry pundits who were working overtime expressing their opinions on JetBlue's future. Positive coverage started to crop up during the second week of the crisis.