Southwest gets boost for nonstop flights
The banners have been hanging in one of the maintenance hangars at Southwest Airlines’ corporate headquarters at Love Field in Dallas for years.
“Wright is wrong!”
“Set Love Free!”
Those were the battle cries of Southwest management, happily carried by the company’s thousands of employees in support of repealing a federal law with Nevada parentage called the Wright Amendment, which heads into the sunset with big fanfare Monday.
Now, there’s a new message appearing on billboards nationwide: “Non-stop LUV.” It refers to Southwest, whose Wall Street ticker symbol is “LUV,” and its sudden ability to fly nonstop anywhere it wants from Dallas.
The Wright Amendment, introduced by Nevada Sen. Howard Cannon in 1979 as a bill to promote international air service — specifically to a then-new airport in Dallas — was debated in 1979, approved in 1980 and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter.
The law was designed as a stimulus to draw flights away from Love Field to the new Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport by banning flights on planes with seat capacities greater than 56 from departing or arriving at Love Field to or from any city outside Texas or its adjacent states.
When DFW opened in 1974, every airline at Love Field except Southwest moved there. Southwest, founded after the Wright Amendment negotiations, believed it should have been exempt from the law.
Considering that Southwest was based at Love Field and had no desire to move to Dallas/Fort Worth, the company stewed over terms of the law for 24 years before announcing publicly in 2004 that it was going to seek repeal of the law.
The battle was on, and the banners flew.
It wasn’t until June 15, 2006, that a compromise to end the amendment was reached.
Under terms of the compromise, Southwest was allowed immediately to market, advertise and sell flights to Dallas. Under the Wright Amendment, the company wasn’t allowed to do that, and for years customers creatively booked two tickets to make their way between Dallas and destinations outside the Wright zone. It was a move that often was more expensive than a nonstop flight on another airline to DFW, but it was an expression of some customers’ unflagging loyalty to Southwest.
The compromise fully lifted flight restrictions as of 12:01 a.m., Oct. 13, 2014. Southwest immediately built a clock in the lobby of its headquarters to count down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to repeal.
For Southwest, repeal of the Wright Amendment is a huge economic shot in the arm.
Since the 2006 compromise, customers wanting to fly to Dallas from Las Vegas would have to book flights that had at least one stop at one of 10 Texas cities or one of eight cities in adjacent states or states added to the Wright zone by special legislation.
Starting Monday, the requirement for one-stop trips to Dallas on Southwest goes away.
Southwest’s first post-Wright Amendment nonstop flights to and from Dallas include operations to McCarran International Airport; Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, Calif.; Denver; Chicago’s Midway Airport; Orlando, Fla.; Baltimore; and Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport. Southwest’s first nonstop arrival from Love Field is scheduled to come in at 11:20 a.m., and the airline is promising an onboard celebration on that first flight.
Southwest’s Las Vegas schedule will include three nonstops. A fourth flight will be added Nov. 2 when the airline will begin Dallas routes to San Diego and Orange County, Calif.; Phoenix; Nashville, Tenn.; Atlanta; Tampa and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; and New York’s LaGuardia International Airport.
Dallas is Las Vegas’ No. 6 domestic market according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, and the new Southwest flights provide a new gateway that is closer from downtown Dallas.
“So far, advance sales for the market are very strong,” said Southwest spokesman Dan Landson.
The new flights were expected to be a benefit to consumers as well. Normally, when Southwest enters a market, fares come down. It’s too early to tell whether the “Southwest effect” will be in play for customers because there are a number of different circumstances on the route.
In addition to different carriers serving different airports, there’s a discount carrier serving the market as well — Spirit Airlines, flying two nonstops a day between McCarran and DFW.
Last week, Southwest’s least expensive round-trip fare to Love Field was $374, but American offered tickets for $278 and Spirit, $259.
Spirit and American, however, charge additional fees for bags that Southwest doesn’t charge. Spirit also charges extra for seat selection.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority pitched in on an outdoor media campaign with Southwest on Sunday, and the airline is celebrating the amendment’s appeal with a concert in Dallas.
There is some downside to the repeal, particularly for some of the cities where passengers had to land to get to or from Dallas — Austin and El Paso, Texas, and Albuquerque, N.M. Southwest has cut some flights to those cities, including one of the three to El Paso and one of the five to Albuquerque.
But Southwest is more than making up for the lost seat capacity with its four Dallas flights by early next month as well as using large-capacity Boeing 737-800 jets with 175 seats on most of those routes instead of 143-seat planes.
Southwest isn’t the only airline that is capitalizing on the Wright Amendment repeal. Starting Monday, Virgin America’s flights to Dallas will land at Love Field instead of DFW, where the airline inaugurated service in 2010.
Virgin was awarded two gates at Love Field by the U.S. Department of Justice as a condition of the antitrust settlement enabling the merger of US Airways with American Airlines. Southwest operates 16 of Love Field’s 20 gates, and United Airlines manages the other two.
Southwest, which also bid for the two gates Virgin won, was disappointed with the outcome because executives had plans for 20 more flights from Love Field.
Virgin will fly nonstop to and from San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington’s Reagan National Airport beginning Monday and LaGuardia in New York beginning Oct. 28. The airline announced in August that it would add more flights to those routes April 29, bringing the total to 16 daily from Love Field.
Virgin is expected to be a competitive check on Southwest. A 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that Love Field had the largest increase in average fares for airports of its size class from 2007 to 2012, 37 percent.
Virgin currently has no plans to offer nonstop service between Las Vegas and Love Field.
Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Find him on Twitter: @RickVelotta.
