We flew to LA via Jet Blue over Presidents’ Day weekend — shouldn’t we just start calling it Presidents’ Weekend? Having a Wild Weekend with Two of Our Better Presidents? — and returned just as the airline was announcing its new passenger bill of rights. Roiled by the disastrous Valentine’s Day snowstorms of last week, which disrupted hundreds of Jet Blue’s flights and left many NY passengers stuck in planes on the tarmac for over eight hours, CEO and founder Dave Neeleman got over the soul searching and beat Congress to the punch by limiting the hours passengers can be stuck on the ground, guaranteeing refunds for cancelled flights and in general promising to treat people better than cargo.

I was watching Brian Williams break the news on my seat-back TV when a Jet Blue flight attendant stopped to ask me about it. She had been at JFK last Wednesday and had sat on the tarmac for four hours with stranded passengers, seen the anger and frustration up close. “Do you think people will forgive us?” she wanted to know and (speaking for Jet Blue loyalists everywhere) I said I thought people would be impressed at how quickly the company reacted…after blowing it for several news cycles. And it might just shame the rest of the airlines to take similar measures (something consumer advocacy groups have been suggesting for years).

“That will just give them another reason to hate us,” she said. In her opinion, and she had apparently been with the company for a while, Jet Blue had grown too fast, adding hundreds of flights and new destinations without any regard for the impact that expansion would have on the airline’s infrastructure. “A lot of us were warning them this would happen on the Speak Up cards they give us,” she said — but she blamed middle management, a sea of bureaucrats that separated Neeleman from his once satisfied customers.

Maybe he was just distracted, I told her; I had read he was ADD. “He’s just like a little boy,” she said. “But sometimes he needs to take his Ritalin.” Nothing like a multi-million dollar PR disaster to get you back on your meds.