Air travel and state oddities

About two weeks ago we had a problem with our software that I was unable to resolve over the phone. So I found myself travelling to Dallas, Texas, on about 3 hours notice. We're a small company; we don't have a dedicated travel person so it fell to me to surf the web and do online bookings. Now you'd think that travelling, by plane, from Phoenix to Dallas would be easy to arrange wouldn't you (even allowing for the fact that this is the Monday before Thanksgiving).

I checked out various options and found the following.

• I can fly Southwest Airlines for about $500 return, but I must go from Phoenix to either El Paso, Texas or Albuquerque, New Mexico (returning the same way). No direct flight to Dallas. Total travel time assuming no delays and counting from arrival at airport to arrival at airport, about 5 hours each way.


• I can fly America West for about $900 return, but I must go from Phoenix to Las Vegas and thence to Dallas, returning the same way. Total travel time assuming no delays and counting from arrival at airport to arrival at airport, about 8 hours each way.


• I can fly United for about $1200 return which is direct Phoenix to Dallas. Total travel time assuming no delays and counting from arrival at airport to arrival at airport, about 3 hours each way.

Well that was pretty much a no-brainer. I took the $500 Southwest flight. Lowest price and middle of the range of travel time. In the event storms made my return flight about 3 hours late but thems the breaks.

Anyway, the reason I'm making this post is that I was puzzled about why I couldn't book a direct flight, on Southwest Airlines, to Dallas. It turns out that there are two major airports in Dallas. The major major one (I've been there and it's huge) is Dallas/Fort Worth International. The other one is Love Field. It seems that when the decision was made to build DFW there was an assumption that Love Field could be closed. But it also seems that some airlines prefer to continue using Love Field (doubtless the gate fees are much lower). So the State of Texas passed a law that restricts landings at Love Field to flights that originate either in Texas or in adjacent states. Hence the stop over in El Paso or Albuquerque.

I chose the flight through Albuquerque. Alas, there was no sign of Bugs Bunny trying to decide whether to take a left turn or not

It was interesting to be passing through Dallas Love Field on November 22nd. The 41st anniversary of the passing of a president through that airport. I'm old enough to remember exactly where I was when the news came through that JFK had been shot and if you'd told me on that day 41 years ago that I'd be living in the US and be in Dallas on the 41st anniversary I'd have thought you had rocks in your head.

Oh, and where was I? The news came over 3UZ Melbourne at 7:45 AM Saturday morning, November 23rd, 1963. I was 9 years old and I had received, that very morning, my first wrist watch. We were driving through the car park at the Victoria Market in Melbourne. Work that time backwards to US time, remembering that in 1963 Victoria didn't do daylight saving. That works out to be 12:45 PM Friday Dallas time. It took a mere 15 minutes for the news to cross the Pacific Ocean. Not bad for a time before satellite TV.