For the traveler who needs a ticket today to fly between Philadelphia and Dallas tomorrow, the round-trip fare on American Airlines or US Airways could be as high as $1,100. But to make a next-day trip to Houston - a route of similar length served by Southwest Airlines - the cost would be $588.
That price difference - and what it could mean in revenue to American - helps explain why American is lobbying hard in Congress to keep a law that prohibits Southwest from offering its signature low-fare flights from Dallas to Philadelphia and other cities.
This week, American released a consultant's study that determined service to many small and medium-size cities from its sprawling hub at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport would be devastated if Congress repealed the Wright Amendment, a 1979 federal rule that restricts flights from Southwest's home base at Dallas Love Field to seven nearby states.
The Wright Amendment, named for former House Speaker Jim Wright, a Democrat from Fort Worth, was adopted to help the then-fledgling Dallas-Fort Worth airport grow. The airport now is the fourth-busiest in the country, largely because American, the biggest U.S. airline in terms of revenue, has 800 flights a day there. Legislation was introduced in Congress in May to repeal the restriction.
American has said that if Southwest can add flights from Love Field, the region's former major airport, American would be forced to move flights there from Dallas/Fort Worth to be competitive. The airline's study, by Eclat Consulting, of Reston, Va., predicted that while Love Field would gain about 125 departures a day, Dallas-Fort Worth would lose more than 200 a day because passengers would have fewer connecting opportunities.
American's study was conducted in response to one Southwest commissioned by Campbell-Hill Aviation, another consulting firm, that forecast repeal of the Wright Amendment would boost traffic at Love Field by 3.7 million passengers a year, a 56 percent increase, because of the attraction of lower fares. Southwest's study assumed it would add about 45 daily flights, including three to Philadelphia, to the 117 it has now at Love.
An independent study of the issue, done by consultant Michael Boyd, predicted that repeal of the Wright Amendment would have only a limited effect on moving flights to Love Field from Dallas-Fort Worth. "American has done a great job of scaring everyone," Southwest spokeswoman Brandy King said. "It's not the earthquake American is saying."
As part of its argument against opening Love, Eclat asserted that new Southwest service does not have the same power to greatly increase traffic at an airport that it once did, and used Philadelphia as an example. This so-called Southwest Effect was first identified in the mid-1990s in a U.S. Department of Transportation study of the power of low fares to increase air travel.
The Eclat study said that much of the surge in traffic at Philadelphia International Airport since Southwest started here in May 2004 was not due to new passengers drawn by lower fares. Rather, it came from people who previously used the Baltimore or Newark, N.J., airports but switched to Philadelphia because prices had dropped, the study said.
Passenger traffic at Philadelphia grew 18.6 percent, to 31 million, in the fiscal year that ended June 30. Southwest started service here May 9, 2004, with 14 daily flights to six cities. That has grown now to more than 50 flights a day to 17 cities.
Philadelphia airport statistics show that a large portion of the growth in passengers was on US Airways, the airport's dominant carrier with almost 500 flights a day, which matched Southwest's fares on routes where they compete.
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