JetBlue Airways Corp.’s board yesterday replaced founder David Neeleman as chief executive officer, three months after the airline canceled almost 1,700 flights and stranded more than 130,000 passengers because of winter storms.

President David Barger, 49, will become CEO, and Mr. Neeleman, JetBlue’s largest individual investor, will be non-executive chairman. “I’m not a day-to-day operator,” Mr. Neeleman, 47, said yesterday in an interview. “It’s not something I enjoyed.”

Mr. Neeleman’s exit extends the management and financial upheaval at New York-based JetBlue, which posted a $22 million firstquarter loss on storm-related flight disruptions and payments to travelers. Shares of the low-cost carrier plunged 20% after the February 14 storm before yesterday.

“Barger is a real operations guy,” a Calyon Securities USA Inc. analyst in New York, Ray Neidl, said. “The airline has reached a certain size where visionaries are being pushed aside and the hard-core operations guys are taking over.”

JetBlue’s board made the change after the carrier’s annual shareholders meeting yesterday. The move followed two straight years of losses at JetBlue, winter operating problems that cost the carrier $41 million, a reshuffling of lower management and ongoing software problems with its Embraer E190 regional jets.

“To the credit of our board, they made this suggestion,” Mr. Neeleman said. “The way it was presented, it made a lot of sense.”

Shares of JetBlue rose 49 cents, or 4.7%, to $10.89 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading.

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services put most of its ratings on Jet-Blue’s debt on CreditWatch with negative implications, saying Mr. Neeleman’s departure could hurt the airline’s “generally positive employee relations and could result in changes in its business model.”

Mr. Barger joined JetBlue as president and chief operating officer in 1998, the year it was founded, and helped build the carrier into the eighth-largest American airline by traffic. “Where we are in our life cycle, this is so natural,” he said of yesterday’s transition, adding that he plans no immediate changes.

“We’ve got a tremendous amount of confidence in Dave Barger and his ability to lead the firm,” a managing director at Thornburg Investment Management Inc., Jet-Blue’s second-largest shareholder, Connor Browne, said. Thornburg held 17.8 million shares, a 10% stake, as of December 31 and added 7 million shares in the December filing period.

“There have been a lot of changes in the executive suite, and we think all of them are for the positive,” Mr. Browne said. He declined to say whether Thornburg had approached JetBlue’s board about a new CEO. JetBlue’s directors didn’t return calls seeking comment or declined to comment on the board’s action.

Mr. Barger ceded his COO title in March when JetBlue picked ex-Federal Aviation Administration official Russ Chew to be chief operating officer. Since then, JetBlue also has named a chief for its John F. Kennedy International Airport hub and added a former United Parcel Service Inc. executive to its board.

Mr. Neeleman’s departure is “surprising, but probably the right move,” a Standard & Poor’s analyst, Jim Corridore, said. “Neeleman led JetBlue as one of the fastest-growing and largest airlines, but we believe recent problems showed a lack of operational expertise.”

JetBlue needed six days to recover from a February 14 ice storm that paralyzed JFK, grounding aircraft across its network and leaving travelers marooned on planes and in terminals for as long as 10 hours. With many jets and crews stuck in the wrong cities, JetBlue scrapped a third of its flights.