Industry History | Southwest Airlines — The 7 a.m. Departure from Love Field
· 1971-6
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Industry History | Southwest Airlines — The 7 a.m. Departure from Love Field
kevin
People treat Southwest as a national low-fare machine that always owned this airport.
The first revenue flight left Dallas Love Field at 7 a.m. on 18 June 1971, bound for San Antonio.
Captain Emilio Salazar flew it. About ten paying passengers boarded by airstairs.
One piece of checked luggage went into the hold. The advertised one-way fare was 20 dollars in 1971 currency.
The company behind the flight was older than the airline name. Air Southwest Co. had been incorporated on 15 March 1967 after Rollin King and his lawyer, Herb Kelleher, set out to fly the Texas triangle of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio as an intrastate carrier, outside Civil Aeronautics Board fare control.
Company lore later placed the first sketch on a cocktail napkin at the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio in 1966. The incorporation papers and the four years of courtroom work are the record.
Braniff, Texas International, and Continental spent those years trying to keep the certificate on the ground. On 17 June 1971 the Texas Supreme Court lifted an injunction that would have stopped the next morning's departure.
The name on the tickets by then was Southwest Airlines Co.
Three Boeing 737-200s opened the triangle. The first day's published pattern was six round trips Dallas–San Antonio and twelve Dallas–Houston Intercontinental.
Later that year half the Houston flying moved to Hobby, an older field the new carrier chose to keep using.
When Dallas–Fort Worth International opened in 1974, the other airlines left Love Field. Southwest stayed.
The Wright Amendment later boxed its interstate flying; the box came off in stages. The terminal on Herb Kelleher Way is still the company's home field.
The S&P 500 airline still dates the start of operations to this runway and this Friday morning.
Photo: EEJCC, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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