Flying with an eye patch

They call it the flaw that distinguishes, and the marketing types point to the fine old men's shirt maker, Hathaway, as the textbook example. The company promoted its brand with a male model who wore an eye patch, and the eye patch became the Hathaway logo. Now JetBlue, that cleverest of airline marketers, is doing something similar, exploiting the airline industry's trademark weakness, its vulnerability to oil prices, in a bid to get public attention (and money). The carrier starts service between its New York JFK hub and Houston next month, and to mark its entry into the heart of the nation's oil patch, JetBlue is promoting a one-way fare that is the same as the price of a barrel of oil. That was in the low $70s when the airline announced the deal, and JetBlue will calculate the fare daily based on oil's closing price on the commodities exchange. The service would probably been promoted with a fare in the $110 to $125 range without the gimmick, and you sort of wonder if they're sort of wishing some days that the price would go up. Sort of. The guys at JetBlue probably know what they're doing, but their gimmick does raise the question: what would the fare be for new service to other cities? What if, say, an airline finally began flights into Chicago? Would it be the price of the Windy City's well-known deep dish pizza? Would Seattle fares be pegged to one of Starbuck's coffee specialities? And flights to New York? WHYDOYAWANNAKNOW, BUDDY?