Passage of The Wright Amendment
After the deregulation of the U.S. airline industry in 1978, Southwest Airlines entered the larger passenger market with plans to start providing interstate service in 1979. This angered the City of Fort Worth, DFW International Airport, and Braniff International Airways. To help protect DFW International Airport, Jim Wright, a Fort Worth congressman, sponsored and helped pass an amendment to the International Air Transportation Act of 1979 in Congress that restricted passenger air traffic out of Love Field in the following ways:
- Passenger service on regular mid-sized and large aircraft could be provided from Love Field only to locations within Texas and the four neighboring states: Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. At the time, all of Southwest's destinations were within this zone, so the law had no immediate effect on Southwest's operations.
- Long-haul service to other states was permissible, but only on commuter aircraft with no more capacity than 56 passengers.
While the law deterred other major airlines from starting service out of Love Field, Southwest continued to expand as it used multiple short-haul flights to build its Love Field operation. This had the effect of increasing local traffic to non-Wright-Amendment-impacted airports such as Houston/Hobby Airport, the New Orleans Airport, and the El Paso and Albuquerque airports.
Some people managed to "work the system" and get around the Wright Amendment's restrictions. For example, a person could fly from Dallas to Houston or New Orleans, change planes, and then fly to any city Southwest served — although he or she had to do so on two tickets in each direction, as the Wright Amendment specifically barred airlines from issuing tickets that violated the law's provisions, or from informing customers that they could purchase multiple tickets that would enable this.
Read more about this topic: Wright Amendment
Famous quotes containing the words passage of, passage, wright and/or amendment:
“The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential. If they exert it not for good, they will for evil; if they advance not knowledge, they will perpetuate ignorance. Let women stand where they may in the scale of improvement, their position decides that of the race.”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“... when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everyone will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people believe that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses were always hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon to-day has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)