DFW gaining new hub???
Well, not really, but sort of.....Southwest will be increasing its presence there.
-----------
"Southwest Airlines ponders expansion in Dallas
by David Koenig
Associated Press
10/5/2004
DALLAS - Southwest Airlines has grown into one of the nation's largest carriers, but at its Dallas home, it's still the regional Texas airline that started flying 30 years ago.
Travelers in Dallas can take Southwest to Houston or Austin - and they do, in huge numbers.
But they can't fly from Dallas Love Field to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or dozens of other major U.S. cities outside the Southwest. It's a federal law.
That could change if South west expands to nearby Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, where financially troubled Delta Air Lines is abandoning gates and dropping most of its flights by February.
"Before Delta's announcement, we would have said we had no interest in being at DFW," Southwest Chief Executive Gary Kelly said. "Obviously, if we find ourselves with more and more competition for customers that use Southwest out of Dallas and thought serving DFW was a way to defend against that ... we just couldn't ignore that."
Why DFW? Southwest could fly from there to anywhere. It can't do that from Love Field because of the Wright Amendment, a 25-year-old federal law pushed by American Airlines and the city of Fort Worth to block competition for DFW after it opened in 1974. The law bans long-haul flights in or out of Love Field except by small planes.
Southwest loses a lot of business because of the law, Kelly said. When the airline last studied the issue in the 1980s, the annual losses were estimated in the tens of millions, he said.
Many local officials consider the law a success. It helped DFW grow into one of the nation's busiest airports, with convenient flights to cities across the country, which in turn helped attract many employers to landlocked north Texas.
The law, however, is a frequent source of irritation for Southwest customers flying out of Dallas, who must change flights before going on to distant destinations - or take another airline.
Southwest has had other chances to start flying from DFW over the years, but always said no.
"We stayed out of the big airports because they are so costly and because you would be competing with the legacy carriers," said Howard D. Putnam, who was chief executive at Southwest before leaving in 1981 to lead Braniff International, which ceased operations the next year.
If Southwest stays out of DFW again, it could open the door for such low-cost airlines as JetBlue and AirTran, which already operates about a dozen daily flights from there.
JetBlue spokesman Gareth Edmonson-Jones said the New York-based carrier believes other cities offer more profit than serving Dallas. JetBlue opened its 29th city, Phoenix, on Friday.
But Dallas could be more appealing to JetBlue by 2006, when the company takes delivery of smaller regional jets that are cheaper to operate than its Airbus A320s, Edmonson-Jones said.
Orlando-based AirTran is still studying whether to seek some of Delta's gates, spokeswoman Judy Graham-Weaver said.
Richard Aboulafia, an airline consultant with The Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., believes that the sheer size of DFW would make it more difficult for a low-cost carrier to operate efficiently there.
"But if you keep your planes moving, it would be OK," Aboulafia said. "You can have a de facto hub without all the costs of a hub."
One of the keys to Southwest's success has been avoiding big airports where planes spend too long taxiing on runways and parked at busy terminals. Those delays wipe out Southwest's ability to unload and send a plane back out in an average of 25 minutes.
Southwest flies into Providence, R.I., and Manchester, N.H., instead of Boston's Logan Airport. It eschews San Francisco, preferring the less-crowded Oakland and San Jose airports. It avoids O'Hare International Airport by flying into Chicago's smaller Midway airport.
On the other hand, Southwest has operated successfully at Los Angeles Inter na tional and, most recently, Phil adel phia.
While Southwest has made inroads against US Airways in Philadelphia, it can be difficult to buck a dominant carrier at a hub. Just ask Delta, which has operated at DFW since it opened, but said last month it would eliminate its hub, conceding defeat to American.
American has occasionally offered service at Love Field, most recently in 2001, when it beat back a challenge from a startup airline that briefly used small jets - getting around the 1978 law - to fly to New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Las Vegas.
American is still paying the lease for three unused gates at Love Field, although some analysts doubt the airline, which barely avoided bankruptcy last year, would pick a fight there with Southwest.
"They have to worry about getting their costs down near the level of the low-cost carriers," said Philip D. Roberts, head of the airline consulting practice at Unisys R2A. "
Bookmarks