Success Quote by David Neeleman

A lot of airlines have come and gone is the kind of plainspoken line that, in the mouth of a serial airline founder like David Neeleman, lands less as trivia and more as a warning label. It compresses decades of bankruptcies, mergers, labor wars, fuel shocks, and thin-margin improvisation into a single, almost casual shrug. That casualness is the point: in aviation, failure is so common it barely needs dramatizing.

Neeleman’s intent reads as pragmatic persuasion. He’s not romanticizing disruption; he’s staking credibility in an industry where optimism can sound like incompetence. By invoking the graveyard of past carriers, he frames any new venture as an exception that must be engineered, not merely imagined. The subtext is ruthless: survival is the achievement, not growth; consumer affection and clever branding won’t outrun unit economics. It also functions as a quiet rebuke to people who treat airlines like ordinary startups, where speed and hype can substitute for infrastructure and regulation.

Context matters because Neeleman’s career (Morris Air, JetBlue, Azul, Breeze) is built on threading a needle: designing airlines that feel customer-friendly while still respecting the brutal physics of cost, weather, and bureaucracy. The line sets the stakes before he makes the pitch. It’s a reminder that airline founders don’t get graded on vision; they get graded on staying airborne when conditions inevitably turn.