A deal is a deal
By Jim Wright
Special to the Star-Telegram
July 3, 2005
After spending 35 years in Congress, I long ago lost count of the number of sundry amendments I offered to various bills. Surely more than 100 of them became law. But these days, whenever people in Texas ask me to explain "the Wright Amendment," I know the one they mean.
That law was a 1979 effort to keep faith with the people of Fort Worth and Dallas, whose cities had acted in unison to build -- with the help of some $96 million from the federal government -- a truly world-class airport.
Our government had granted that money and its official sanction on the clearly stated condition that both cities pass legal ordinances permanently closing Dallas Love Field and Fort Worth's Meacham Field and Greater Southwest International Airport to all commercial passenger traffic.
Both city councils had done precisely that. Wanting something far better, safer, more modern and more serviceable for everyone in the region, they formally shut down the two old nearby airports to all but private flights.
Greater Southwest, an earlier attempt to popularize a midway airport for the two cities, would be subsumed as a sort of southerly appendage to the new Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, and it of course would no longer independently originate any commercial passenger flights.
The Federal Aviation Administration correctly foresaw the growth of long-distance and international travel, requiring larger and larger aircraft with longer radius-of-maneuver requirements that would create dangerously overlapping takeoff and landing patterns if both D/FW and Love were initializing passenger flights in large aircraft.
Concerned for safety and fearful of aerial traffic jams, the FAA demanded wider separation than the close physical proximity of Love and D/FW runways.
FAA spokesmen insisted, before signing off on the ambitious development plans for D/FW, that commercial passenger service at Love, Meacham and Greater Southwest be terminated altogether.
Those conditions having been met by the closing of the two old commercial airports, bonds were sold, guaranteeing their purchasers -- in writing, on the good faith and credit of the two cities -- that there would be no commercial passenger flights at Love, Greater Southwest or Meacham.
In 1974, residents of our two largest cities and other nearby towns celebrated the grand opening of D/FW Airport. It was a triumph of reason over greed, we told one another. It proved that we'd outgrown our childish feuds and finally buried our hatchets -- elsewhere than in one another's skulls.
Progressive leadership in both towns hailed the dawn of cooperation to drive away the long night of feuding. That old rivalry had fed for more than a century on a colorful if flinty-hearted past.
In the days when wagon trains were bringing settlers westward, Dallas merchants would regale westbound migrants with lurid tales of mortal danger and/or lethal boredom that lay in wait to devour them if they ventured as far as Fort Worth. They'd be scalped by Indians, eaten alive by wild animals or condemned to terminal stagnation.
Fort Worth, aside from being dangerous, was described as already dead itself -- so sleepy, according to one warning, that a panther had been seen dozing languidly in the middle of a downtown street.
To counter this verbal roadblock, Fort Worth organized teams of outriders to intercept the wagon trains east of Dallas and escort them to Fort Worth by a circuitous route that skirted any sight of the rival village.
Both towns whetted their competitive skills and reveled overly long in the two-way surfeit of one-upmanship.
When Dallas in 1936 hosted a yearlong exposition in honor of the Texas Centennial, Fort Worth countered with a gaudy Frontier Exposition of its own.
"Come to Dallas for culture," Fort Worth sloganeered, "but come to Fort Worth for fun."
An earlier attempt to operate a mutual airport had faltered in the late 1940s and early '50s. Runways had been located meticulously halfway between Fort Worth's Texas Hotel corner and the Adolphus Hotel corner in Dallas. Then Dallas discovered that the terminal building would face west from the centerline toward Fort Worth, and the deal was off!
Legend says that Fort Worth's No. 1 booster, publishing icon Amon G. Carter, carried his lunch in a paper sack when going to Dallas to avoid patronizing any Dallas eatery. And Dallas' merchant prince, Stanley Marcus, refused to order merchandise from any company whose salesman had flown into the midway airport, known variously as "Greater Southwest Regional Airport" and "Amon Carter Field."
But in 1974, we all mutually rejoiced that we were, at last, singing from the same hymn book and working together!
In this euphoric spirit, things rested -- until the intercession of a state agency known as the Texas Aeronautics Commission. That now-defunct commission, on being petitioned by Southwest Airlines, ordered Dallas to reopen Love Field for use by Southwest, which then was headed by Lamar Muse.
The state commission's edict had to be obeyed by the cited city, but it had no jurisdiction outside Texas.
If Southwest had wanted to establish out-of-state schedules, it could have done so by flying from D/FW, just as all the other airlines were doing. At the time, however, Southwest was principally interested in launching flights linking Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.
Meanwhile, freed from certain landing fees that helped pay off the D/FW bonds, Southwest adopted "no-frill" service, advertised low rates and began to flourish. Its owners began to dream of interstate flights.
All its Love Field destinations were in Texas. Invited to use D/FW, the management expressed little interest.
Then came 1978. A movement -- quietly supported by the economically dominant airlines and a group of laissez-faire economists -- to deregulate U.S. aviation was gathering steam.
From the birth of the federally subsidized industry, scheduled passenger flights and fares had been approved and closely monitored in the interest of the flying public by the Civil Aeronautics Board, just as safety matters were monitored by the FAA. The CAB saw to it that all markets were served, that fares were reasonable and that no airline was allowed to monopolize service.
President Carter, somewhat surprisingly, endorsed the concept of deregulation. A bill to effectively abolish the CAB's work swept through the House. Suddenly, prevailing aviation laws would expire, and we'd simply let any airline fly from and to wherever it wished and charge whatever fares it might choose.
Civic leaders, frequent travelers, mayors and city council members from Fort Worth and Dallas saw this as a potential danger to D/FW's contractual agreements. If any company could fly anywhere it wanted out of a reopened Love Field, this could easily renew all the old cutthroat battles that the international airport had been created to settle.
In 1979, this group of concerned citizens came to me for help.
My original amendment, the one that initially passed the House, would have prohibited any interstate commercial passenger flights to or from any airport within a 20-mile radius of D/FW. It was enthusiastically supported by the official leadership of Fort Worth and Dallas.
It set off, however, a massive lobbying effort in the Senate, which rejected the amendment as written and called for a conference committee to resolve differences.
It was at this point that my office participated in discussions with every party at interest, seeking a solution that everyone would recognize as fair. Through these negotiations, we ultimately reached an agreement that all parties embraced.
It allowed Love Field to serve interstate traffic limited to turnaround service between Love and the contiguous states: Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. This restriction applied equally to Southwest and all airlines.
Southwest was not singled out in any way.
Herb Kelleher -- founder, legal counsel and longtime leader of Southwest -- expressed satisfaction. He'd won a significant victory. And he was welcome, even overtly encouraged, to expand into other states with longer-range flights into and out of D/FW Airport.
Southwest is still welcome there. That Southwest has chosen not to accept the invitation has been entirely of its own volition.
That's about all there is to the "Wright Amendment." This compromise was designed to be in perpetuity, to settle once and for all this very divisive issue.
Continued, next post.....
