justageek

Looks like they're close to putting a fork in it. (They = the cities councils.)

http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dw....6cb8bcd7.html

Major provisions
* Wright to be phased out over 9 years
* Southwest to be permitted thru/connecting-ticketing to non-Wright states immediately (no more "Texas Two-Step")
* AA forced to leave DAL permanently
* Overall # of gates at DAL to be capped at 20, with Southwest allowed to maintain its near-monopoly of the airport (oops, a little editorializing there!)

The only interesting thing to see will be how AA will spin this as a victory for them. Clearly they lost, as virtually every commentator and expert has predicted since the day Southwest shifted from "passionately neutral" on Wright to "passionately opposed" to Wright.

DallasBill

The correct subject of this post should be:
Details on a PROPOSED Wright compromise between Dallas and Fort Worth city councils and NOT Congress who must change the law starting to emerge.

swag

9 years seems like a very long time.

justageek

Not really, when you consider that the original intent of the Wright Amendment was that it would last for the lifetime of the DAL airport. Remember that Southwest got the real prize, being able to stay at DAL, and only a year or so ago did they become opposed to Wright.

curbcrusher

I think this is awful. Nine years is indeed too long, and further limiting gates as a sop to AA-funded "neighborhood" groups at the expense of AA or any other carrier (exempting WN from gate-sharing) seems entirely wrong-headed.

curbcrusher

So a law, no matter how stupid, should be phased out over a long time simply because it was intended to never be repealed? That's absurd.

dfwbob

This whole thing is a joke, so much for competition and as for the 20 gate count, well who is going to trust Dallas, they didn't keep their word with Fort Worth on the 1968 Bond agreement, why would they trust Dallas now to cap the gates at 20.

justageek

Right. There's no reason Southwest won't become "passionately opposed" to the 20-gate cap five or ten years from now, start a media campaign claiming the cap is anti-free-market, and get the cap repealed. (Sound familiar?)

But lifting Wright is politically expedient because it will bring lower fares on some routes, so it's going to happen regardless of whether the "compromise" is fair in light of the original history and intent of Wright.

SAPMAN

Looks like something is likely to happen, but who knows what.

Local neighbors oppose any more expansion of Love as noise, traffic, etc. would get worse. I think only fair to allow AA to stay to allow competition from DAL. I am unsure how many unused or underused gates there are, but there are a number in the center section that are used for training now. And how many does WN have now - about 12? If max. is 20 and 3-5 are used by others, not much expansion available for WN there.

Time will tell.

swag

There are 32 gates at DAL, which is the top limit of the current master plan .

Southwest currently uses 14 DAL gates for flights, plus it uses 7 for training. AA uses 3. Continental has 2. 6 are over in the old Legend terminal on Lemmon and are unused.

http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dw...0328wright.pdf

LoneStarMike

The 1968 Bond Ordinance stipulated that the two cities shall take such steps as may be necessary, appropriate, and legally permissible (without violating presently outstanding legal commitments or covenants prohibiting such action), to provide for the orderly, efficient and effective phase-out at Love Field, Redbird, GSIA and Meacham Field, of any and all Certificated Air Carrier Services, and to transfer such activities to the Regional Airport effective upon the beginning of operations at the Regional Airport.

In November of 1971 M. Lamar Muse, Southwest's president notified Dallas that they wished to remain at Love Field.

Shortly thereafter in June 1972, Dallas and Ft. Worth filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court seeking to evict Southwest from Love Field.

The case was heard in March 1973, less than a year before DFW was to open.

In that case the district court held on several grounds that Dallas could not block Southwest from using Love Field.

Among other things, Dallas' efforts to stop Southwest's service violated its obligation under federal law not to discriminate among airport users. While the Bond Ordinance prohibited intrastate flights by airlines like Southwest operating under state authority, it allowed airlines operating under federal certificate authority to operate intrastate flights and allowed non-certificated commuter airlines to operate at Love Field.

Source

(Factual and Legal Background section as noted in the Deparment of Transportation's 1998 ruling on Love Field.)

(Note: Today, there are many on the pro-Wright side that claim that Dallas Love Field was supposed to be either shut down completely, or closed to all commercial traffic. The fact that the 1968 Bond Ordinance specifically allowed intrastate flights by the CAB carriers and also allowed commercial air taxis would seem to dispute these claims.)

The court further ruled that while the City of Dallas was not obligated to provide Love Field as an airport for Southwest, as long as it remained open and operational, Southwest could not be excluded from flying there.

Despite the court's decision concerning Southwest at Love Field, the Dallas City Council passed an ordinance closing Love Field to all commercial traffic and imposing a $200 fine for each take-off and landing by a commercial airline at Love Field effective May 1, 1974. The district court intervened and stopped Dallas from enforcing this ordinance, saying the city's actions were in "open defiance" of its earlier ruling.

Dallas tried everything they could to force Southwest out. What was Dallas supposed to do? Defy a court order just to please Fort Worth?

Regarding the whole idea of limiting the numnber of gates to 20, I'm not sure Love Field can do that.

Dallas accepted federal funds from the FAA's Airport Improvement Program to pay for the improvements associated with the 2001 Love Field Master Plan.

If you look at the Overview Section of that site under "What types of projects are eligible?" you'll see that one of the eligibility requirements is that the project is depicted on a current airport layout plan approved by the FAA.

The FAA approved the project based on a 32-gate master plan, not one that called for 20 gates.

A November 15, 2005 article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram noted:

Miller suggested tearing down the empty six-gate terminal formerly used by Legend Airlines and capping Love Field's capacity at 26 gates.

[SNIP]

Terry Mitchell, assistant director of operations at Love Field, said he doesn't disagree with Miller, but he said it could be hard to get approval from the FAA to limit capacity after Love Field has already proved that it could handle enough traffic for 32 gates.

"You can't just arbitrarily do it," he said. "If you want to go back and restrict it, then you really must have a strong case for doing it."

Love Field also has an obligation to maintain a competition.plan, which they do.

DALLAS POLICY ON REASONABLE AIR CARRIER ACCESS

Dallas understands its legal obligations under Federal law and, therefore, strives to accommodate all air carriers seeking to provide service at Love Field subject to restrictions imposed by Federal law.

In addition, Dallas recognizes that, by having accepted Federal grants, it has undertaken a legal obligation to provide reasonable air carrier access at Love Field.

The City of Dallas can "ask" AA to leave all they want, but I just don't see where they have any legal basis to "force" AA out of Love Field.

That does not qualify IMO as providing "reasonable" access to all carriers, especially if the carrier they are going to ask to leave has a current lease on three gates and has spent money refurbishing them.

Finally, the whole idea of a 9 year phaseout is ridiculous. Back n 1978, the Senate bill proosing deregulation was introduced on February 6, 1978 and was signed into law on October 24, 1978. On December 15, 1978 Braniff International launched service to 32 new cities from DFW.

If the rest of the country could adjust to deregulation in that amount of time, I see no reason why DFW should need nine years.

You're right dfwbob. This whole thing is a joke.

LonetarMike

HKG_Flyer1

justageek

Aieeeeeeee, let's just rename this thread "Southwest worries about the quality of life of North Texans" and go home.

I don't have the brain power to read all of the previous posts, but I will ask this: if the Wright Amendment was designed to punish Southwest, and there was truly no legal standing for the city, state, or national government to force Southwest out of DAL or shut down the airport to commercial (or all) traffic, then why didn't Southwest fight to repeal Wright from day one? Why, for decades, did they have a stated policy of being "passionately neutral" on Wright rather than opposed? Note that they continued that policy well into the years when they were a national carrier and would have benefitted from repeal.

You guys are clearly not presenting both sides of the story here. In the wake of Wright, DAL continued as a commercial airport and WN as its main tenant. Southwest presumably didn't want to "rock the boat" for some reason -- I assume they knew they stood to lose more by doing so than they might gain.

HKG_Flyer1

justageek

You're kididng, right? My understanding is that Gary Kelly is the one who brought up the idea of moving Southwest's headquarters, presumably as an implicit "threat" to Dallas.

I don't buy your explanation for why Southwest waited to oppose Wright. By all reports, AA and Southwest got along just fine for many years, even as Southwest became a national airline. Southwest could have been "passionately opposed" but not spent the money to fight Wright, just to show their opposition. But they didn't -- they were "passionately neutral" until just last year.

Neither airline cares about the "quality of life of North Texans." They just care about their bottom lines. Southwest sees an opportunity right now for regulatory change that benefits them, so they're going after it. (And I think they realize public sympathy is only going to decline from this point, because their cost structure is forcing them to charge higher fares than the legacies in many cases these days, and their costs are going nowhere but up.) The idea that either side really cares about the fares North Texans are paying, or the amount of noise around DAL, or the economy of North Texas, is laughable. Yes, there will be side effects to keeping or removing Wright that will impact on those issues, but they're fundamentally smokescreens behind corporate-funded campaigns on both sides to Set Love Free or Keep DFW Strong.