What do JetBlue and Britney Spears have in common? Both have experienced a serious reputation collapse in the past several days. In the case of JetBlue, it had a lot to lose.

Troll any cocktail party in Palm Beach these days and you’ll meet weekenders who swear by JetBlue. These are the folks who head out to Kennedy Airport on a Friday afternoon, climb aboard the 3:05 flight, confidant that they’ll arrive in time for dinner and a well-earned weekend in the sun. They probably don’t even care that Delta is offering a cheaper nonstop; they like JetBlue. More importantly, they trust JetBlue.

Until now. The real cost of the fiasco played out on the tarmacs last week is not the $30 million the company has estimated that it might have to pay out to compensate disgruntled passengers. It is the loss of customer confidence.

A New York society decorator and frequent traveler to Palm Beach, Ann LeConey, had, like so many others, a day from hell on Valentine’s Day. She traveled out to Kennedy Airport in time for an 8 a.m. flight, boarded the airplane on schedule, but was taken off the plane at 10 a.m. when the airport closed. With her fellow travelers, she was kept in the lounge until 6 p.m., when the plane was reboarded. The word was, “This plane is going to Palm Beach.”

Though the passengers were more than ready to head south, the plane was not. It had no pilot. After a five-hour search, a pilot was found, amidst much cheering, but the euphoria quickly died when it developed that there was no copilot. By the time that chair was filled, another hour had passed, at which point the pilot announced that he was over his work limit and could no longer fly.

Around midnight, the passengers were convinced with some difficulty to get off the plane and were funneled back into the lounge. They were told that management representatives would meet them in the baggage area. After two hours, their bags showed up, but the only JetBlue representative was a stout woman with a bullhorn who repeatedly threatened: “Unless you behave and are civilized I will not give you your luggage.” She had taken the precaution of securing two Port Authority police officers to act as her bodyguards.

“I don’t think they were prepared for a crisis,” Howard Rubenstein, probably the best known disaster management specialist in the public relations field, says. “The problem is that the disaster goes to the heart of their reputation for efficiency. They have boasted about their few management layers; in the end, they didn’t have enough management, and the management was not well trained.”

The good news? “The CEO, or whoever is advising him, has good promotional instincts,” Mr. Rubenstein says. He approves of the company’s “Customer Bill of Rights,” and the oft-repeated apologies. “The first rule of thumb is to ask, what was the right thing to do? Gather the facts and then find out what went wrong, and apologize.”

The bad news? Rectifying the situation is going to be costly. “The risks are now that management will fail again. They will have to overstaff. They should probably recruit some experienced people from the other airlines who are well trained in managing disasters, and go about retraining their own people. The company has to be absolutely positive of avoiding another breakdown. The public will blame them for any problems that come up now, even those that are weather-related,” Mr. Rubenstein says.

Mr. Rubenstein recommends several creative approaches to restoring JetBlue’s image. He suggests they hire a number of people from the hotel industry to work on their service cues. He also thinks that they could hire several psychologists to boost morale and people skills among JetBlue workers. They could start a campaign featuring happy customers.

Though such efforts could play out well with consumers, Mr. Rubenstein admits that a public relations effort in this case will only be as effective as the measures taken to strengthen the company’s management shortcomings.

On that front, the company needs to address not only the poor personnel response, but also the entire breakdown of communications, and the lack of emergency arrangements both with the Port Authority and with other airlines.

Mr. Rubenstein would blitz the public about the company’s makeover efforts for two or three months. With luck, and no further disasters, the company should recover in about one year. If they experience another meltdown, however, the damage could well be permanent.

Mr. Rubenstein had five family members traveling last weekend who were caught overnight at the airport. “They are saying they’ll never fly JetBlue again,” he says. “I’m telling them that the service is probably going to be terrific now, since the company will have to over-compensate. They’re saying — let’s think about it. That’s the risk.”

Ms. Peek is a columnist of The New York Sun and can be reached at Peek10021@aol.com.