In the late seventies, when DFW airport was built, Jim Wright, then House Majority Leader, and representative from Ft Worth, got congress to pass a bill that including restrictions on flights from Dallas' Love Field (then the airport for Dallas), and, since Southwest Airlines, for a variety of legal reasons, could not be ousted from Love to DFW, restrictions on where they could fly out of Love. While it was clearly a slap at Dallas from Ft Worth, it was probably a good idea overall for the development of the giant, new regional airport.
Time has passed, DFW is entrenched and crowded, and Love Field is hideously underutilized. It is time to reconsider the restrictions on Love and move towards a unified airtrans plan for the region, not just Dallas trying to revivify Love and Ft Worth trying to keep DFW king (the airport is actually in Ft Worth proper, altho it's about equal distance from both 'downtowns')
There is opposition from all over the map, and support from an equal number of sources. Opening up Love, however minimally, will have an impact on DFW. It will have an impact, to some degree, on the quality of life of airport neighbors (disclaimer: I grew up in Dallas, just off the flightpath of Love and I'm fine
I don't know what the ideal solution is and it's unlikely that whatever comes out of Congress will be the ideal solution. That said, I think it's time to take the fetters off Love and let it serve the area better than it does now. Maybe a start would be to let SW fly to more than the five surrounding states it can now serve. This would take some of the pressure off DFW and give travelers options they dont have now (including me, who'd like to be able to fly into DFW from my 'new' home in California, without actually flying into DFW airport (Love is about ten minutes from my relatives, DFW is about 45)). Any solution is going to have consequences, good or ill, for many players. My bet is that there will some easing of the restrictions, but not removal.
At least, it's a step.
5 comments:
Wright was originally put into place as a precursor to Love being closed. The plan all along when they opened DFW was to close Love Field. It's maddening that they haven't been able to follow that plan.
I forget exactly why, but SWA was able to circumvent the order moving all the airlines to DFW (it was some bizarre legal/contractual thing...hey, Herb was the corporate lawyer before he was President/Chief Shill). So Southwest was able to stay at Love. It's hard to argue that that has been a bad thing in terms of economic benefit to Dallas.
Actually, there was never any plan to close Love Field, although there was a plan to stop commercial air service at Love Field.
The courts repeatedly held that it was illegal to stop Southwest from flying at Love Field, notwithstanding all sorts of legal stunts pulled by American Airlines.
Today, air traffic at Love Field is down significantly from its peak. Indeed, Southwest operates less than 1/3 of the flights out of Love Field, and its aircraft are among the quietest there.
I live under the flight path to runway 31R... while it can be noisy at times, this is due to corporate aircraft, not Southwest jets.
If we want to do something about noise, we need to focus on regulating corporate jet activity.
Right, when I said 'close' I meant to commercial. Sorry for the confusion there.
Southwest is about 98% of the commercial air travel going into Love though. The community plan all along was to consolidate commercial traffic at DFW. Southwest is clearly thinking of their profits more so than the communities economic plan.
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