Last year I wrote, “Wait, Dave Neeleman’s son is married to the reigning Mrs. America and they have 8.1 million followers on Instagram, over a million subscribers on YouTube and nearly 7 million followers and over 100 million likes on TikTok?”

One Mile at a Time writes about airline CEO Dave Neeleman’s son and how he wound up dating and marrying his wife. She’s profiled in the Sunday Times: “Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children).”

Her father in law may have founded or led Morris Air (sold to Southwest), WestJet, JetBlue Airways, Azul and Breeze Airways and owned 45% of TAP Air Portugal, but his daughter-in-law is far more influential online.

Hannah Neeleman, known to her nine million followers as Ballerina Farm, milks cows, gives birth without pain relief and breastfeeds at beauty pageants. Is this an empowering new model of womanhood — or a hammer blow for feminism?

Apparently her husband pursued her for a date for six months. They wound up booked on the same JetBlue flight from Salt Lake City to New York JFK . And he arranged to have them seated next to each other.

He was 23 and she was nearly two years his junior when they were introduced by a mutual friend at a college basketball game. “I saw her and I was ready to go,” he says. “Sign me up. I was thinking, ‘Let’s get married.’ But she wouldn’t go on a date with me for six months.”

One day she mentioned to Daniel that she was getting the five-hour flight from Salt Lake City to New York, back to Juilliard. She didn’t realise his dad owned the airline. “So Daniel was, like, ‘I’m on that same flight!’” she says. “I remember checking in and them saying, ‘You’re 5A and you’re 5B.’ I just thought, no way, that’s crazy!” Daniel smiles: “I made a call.” He had pulled strings at JetBlue. And so began their first date.

One Mile at a Time says ‘pulling strings’ to do this is ‘creepy’. But would he even have needed to ‘pull strings’ with a connection as the son of the airline’s by then deposed founder, in order to do this?

• He knows what flight she’s on, so calling reservations and identifying flight number and passenger name is easy. You verify their seat assignment.
  
• Hang up, call back. Ask to change seats to an open seat beside them.
  
• Or you change their seat to an open one beside you if needed.

‘Strings’ here would only be needed if there weren’t any available seats next to each other and he needed to get another passenger moved out of their seat to execute his plan. And this is JetBlue, it’s not first class since there was no first class (no Mint either, then). Doesn’t seem hard! Creepy, perhaps, but it doesn’t require any special connections with the airline or ‘strings’ to pull off at all.

Some years ago an Air India captain refused to fly to the Maldives unless the airline scheduled a particular female co-pilot to fly there with him. And they obliged. That was inappropriate!

When I was first dating my wife and she went on a business trip I confirmed an upgrade on her cross country flight back from San Francisco. It was her first time in first class. She didn’t know until she arrived at the airport and checked in for her flight.

She told me she had to decide if it was amazing or creepy that I could do that to her reservation (she hadn’t even given me the confirmation number)? She decided amazing, but it could have easily gone the other way!