Your "ridiculous restrictions" were what let DFW float bonds to build what would become a behemoth that would best serve both Dallas and Ft Worth. Without the restrictions, there would have been no assurance that Meacham and Love wouldn't have continued on to undercut the new expensive (relative) airport that opened in the 70's.
The restrictions were designed to keep Love and Meacham as commuter type airports to handle the intra texas traffic and later near state traffic.
Funny how some like to rewrite history in a way that portrays SWA as some random victim in random airport oversight.....
Sorry, but you're wrong here. Speaking of revisionist history...
DFW's bonds were "floated" long before Southwest Airlines existed. Construction from these bonds started in 1969 (the site was decided on and the land purchased in 1966) and the airport opened for service in January 1974. The Wright Amendment didn't exist until 1979; it had jack-diddly-squat to do with raising money to build DFW.
Southwest began service as an intrastate airline at Love Field in June 1971, and that was only after a prolonged legal battle to kill us. The intrenched airlines tried to kill us simply to not have competition at all; it was not having anything to do with DFW. Incidentally, those three airlines (two that no longer exist and Continental) pleaded no contest in
criminal court for their illegal efforts to kill us. When the Airline Deregulation Act was passed in 1978, Southwest prepared to fly out of Texas. Again the other airlines sued. Every single effort failed on their merits, again,... and on appeal, failed yet again. There was no legal justification of any sort to stop us. So, after all the legal defeats, Speaker of the house Wright (D-Ft Worth), an American Airlines stooge, simply changed the law. His first attempt (stand alone) was soundly defeated in Congress, so he attached it to an unrelated important bill where it finally succeeded.
While Braniff and American Airlines and Speaker Wright (and apparently you, Full of It) like to claim it was to "protect" DFW, it was really instituted solely to prevent Southwest Airlines from competing with the other airlines. DFW needed no protection; it was already 10 times the size of Love Field, and has further grown over the years to be the third busiest airport in the world. There was nothing on earth that was going to replace the capacity that DFW supplied to the Dallas metroplex, even in 1979. Yet American still launched an expensive PR effort in 2006, claiming the Wright Amendment was still needed to "keep DFW strong," as if DFW might die otherwise. BS. It was to keep American Airlines profits up, at the expense of American capitalistic competition, same as in 1979.
Regardless, no other private entity ever had a friggin
law passed on its behalf, hobbling possible competitors. No other airport in the country has had its sponsors place restrictions placed on
other airports, simply to kill the competition. No other airport needs this "protection"; why should DFW? Why do you think it took Speaker Wright, from Ft Worth, with hundreds of thousands of of dollars in American Airlines political contributions, to
sneak this law in?
You are right about on thing, however--Southwest wasn't a "random victim." Southwest was a very specifically targeted victim in the whole sordid political charade that was the Wright Amendment.
Bubba
