JS said:
(emphasis added)
You are convinced that Southwest must either fly nothing from DFW or shut down Love Field and pack up & outright move to DFW. There is no point in continuing to discuss this topic with you.
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AFAIK, the "official" reason that they want DAL to stay restricted is because it is the greatest benefit to the North Texas economy. BUT, I would argue that lifting DAL restrictions would be the greatest benefit. Let's look at the three scenarios:
1) Close DAL. Not an option, since Dallas wants the bizjets and the people in the bizjets want the close-in airport. It was proven legally Dallas cannot ban commercial traffic as long as the airport is open.
2) Leave DAL as it is and WN starts DFW ops. Will hurt the economy in one of two ways: a) Southwest will only have longhaul flights out of DFW, not allowing the full potential for connecting traffic. Somebody traveling PIT-AUS will opt to go through Nashville or Midway instead, causing a loss of revenue for the North Texas airport the passenger would have traveled through, and any services s/he would utilize, such as food, alcohol, magazines, gifts, etc., further hurting the Dallas economy. The other option, B) that Southwest will move its entire operation to DFW, is ludicrous. As Herb said when initially defending why it wants to stay at DAL, nobody from Dallas would go to DFW for a 45-minute flight when the drive to the airport is at least that long. If Southwest moves all ops to DFW, an immense amount of traffic will dry up for them and cause fewer people to go through any Dallas airport.
3) Repeal the Wright Amendment. This brings the greatest economic benefit to the region. As proven time and time again in all markets WN has entered, total traffic will go up in the DFW region. Find me one city-pair where O/D traffic decreased after WN came in. More traffic means more money to the airports, who pro-Wright supporters have said several times 'this is about airports, not airlines'.
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Air_guy stated that if the Wright Amendment was never brought up by WN, we would have a new carrier in DFW already. I would like to ask him which airline other than WN, since he said that they are scaring the other airlines ready to go in, would even be able to accomplish adding 150 daily flights to/from DFW in the 10 gates and have 70% of the new seats to destinations the airline currently does not serve in the top 50 D-FW O/D markets? United & US are such a clusterf*ck right now that serving Dallas is probably their last priority, especially with both returning aircraft. DL is the one that left. NW is currently building up their Midwest presence in MKE and IND to worry about yet another focus city, plus CO is 200 miles away in IAH so they wouldn't take it and NW codeshares with them anyway. HP is trying to deal with US, and before that they were not interested in openign a new hub. FL would have to dedicate all 19 aircraft they were receiving this year and another 5-6 from current ops to service DFW, meaning they would have to pull several existing routes and would not be able to add anything new to their schedule this year such as CLT, IND, and RIC or other routes they currently have. TZ is just trying to get back into profitability right now. All other carriers are way too small to add anything meaningful to DFW other than 2-3 cities. So can you name me one carrier that would start ops to DFW, and descrive how it is feasible air_guy?
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"Is like the assurances that WN will not put too many flights out of DAL, or the assurances that AA won't try to move flights to DAL creating a big mess, or the assurances that traffic stimulation will solve all of our problems. "
Master Plan limits DAL to 32 gates, 20-21 for WN. WN won't have more than 200 flights there, and AA couldn't add more than 100 assuming they received EVERY open gate available, which will not be ready immediately. I love the rationale that people say AA will move their ops to DAL. I would pay money to watch AA try and operate 900 flights out of 11 gates. A couple dozen flights to business destinations such as LGA, DCA, PHL, BOS, LAX, SFO, ORD, etc. will not hurt DFW.
I addressed traffic stimulation earlier.