Think of Hobby as the Wal-Mart of Texas airports: no frills, crowded, long lines, utterly charmless, but you can find just about anything you want in the way of flights, and the price is right. When Consumer Reports sampled fares in Houston recently, flying out of Hobby was cheaper than flying out of crosstown Intercontinental for 95 percent of the comparable flights. That's because Hobby is a Southwest Airlines hub without the burdens of Love Field, where the airline is required by the Wright Amendment to serve only contiguous states. The low fares and open competition at Hobby are a case study of what Love Field would be like if the legal restrictions were removed. Hobby is so old (it used to be Houston's main airport until Intercontinental opened in 1969) that its toilets still have flush handles.

The good news is that changes are afoot. The airport has been held back for years by the onerous restrictions of the Wright Amendment, a federal law that limited interstate flights from Love to states contiguous to Texas—New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. But this protectionist law, fashioned by former Fort Worth congressman Jim Wright to make sure that the big airlines had to stay at DFW for long-distance flights, now has an exception known as the Shelby Amendment. Longer nonstop flights are allowed if the planes have no more than 56 seats, a limitation that conveniently includes the new generation of commuter jets, like the Embraer regional jets. The new law has encouraged American, Delta Connection, Continental Express, and a new Love-based start-up, Legend Airlines, which together provide nonstop service to New York (La Guardia), Los Angeles (LAX), Chicago (O'Hare), Washington (Dulles), Cleveland, and Las Vegas. There's no telling how much Love might improve and how much consumers might benefit from lower fares at both Love and DFW if the Wright Amendment was eliminated altogether.