Quote:
Originally Posted by left of center
I remember hearing years back that MDW was Southwest's largest hub with a similar feeling of surprise, knowing that they were based in Dallas. Unlikely they will ever move though in the near future (as cool as it would be to have another airliner based in town). I'm pretty sure even the threat to move to Chicago over the Wright Amendment back in the day was more or less and empty threat, especially since leaving Texas would still not have solved the issue of flying across the country from Love Field, their primary base of operations in Texas (in addition to Hobby-Houston).
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Southwest is quite the outlier in terms of overall airline hub and spoke systems, as I'm sure most of us already know around here. Yes, Dallas/Love Field, Houston Hobby and Chicago Midway are certainly their largest 'hubs', but they also have massive operations out of places as diverse as Las Vegas, Denver, Baltimore, Phoenix, Atlanta, Oakland, among a number of others. I'd guess that Southwest has the largest number of "super-regional hubs" if you will, because they really aren't necessarily traditional hubs at all, rather part of a network where the majority of their flights are less than 3 hours per segment.
Regardless, I do agree that there's no chance in hell they'd move their HQ to Chicago. Too Texas-centric, and they more or less control the legislature to boot.
Aaron (Glowrock)