There is a fascinating business drama flowing out of the flight delays, cancellations and schedule problems encountered by JetBlue Airlines, one worthy of a business school case study, and it’s this: How will JetBlue management respond to this business-altering crisis?

I’m not talking about the short-term response like free trips and refunds that CEO David Neeleman has been talking about. Those are fine, but also very predictable. JetBlue’s big challenge will be to figure out how to alter its business model to really learn from this meltdown and make sure there are better systems in place to ensure that things don’t unravel this way again.

Back in 2001, when it was still very new, JetBlue took a very customer-focused approach to the events of 9/11 and the shut down of air travel in the United States. JetBlue people chief Vincent Stabile talked to Workforce Management about how the company’s customer-focused approach helped it deal with the crisis, emphasizing that “from the moment the team at JetBlue realized that a true crisis was happening, all of the values people had talked about were in play.”

So what changed at JetBlue from 2001 to 2007? Why couldn’t the airline deal as effectively with a weather-related crisis six years later? These are the questions JetBlue management needs to answer. The people at the top must figure this out and come up with a long-term solution that leverages both the values of the company and the strengths of its workforce to prove to customers that the company’s mission statement—”To continue to bring humanity back to air travel”—isn’t just another slick marketing slogan that is quickly forgotten when things get tough.