Dallas Love Field went from being referred to as “the air capital of the Southwest” (The Dallas Morning News, 1940) to “Dallas’ other airport” on Jan. 13, 1974, when Dallas-Fort Worth Regional (now International) Airport opened its runways. Airlines were excited to adapt to the four horseshoe-shaped terminals (now terminals A, B, C and E), each of which was way larger than the small concourses they left behind at Love.
When the 1958 terminal opened, The Dallas Morning News referred to it, and Love Field, with an adjective that might not have been the first to come to anyone else’s mind to describe the shiny green terminal — “asset.” It was considered a “magnificent asset” because DAL was “one of the few major airports of the world located so closely and conveniently to the heart of the community.”
It seemed that most of the community forgot that notion when looking at the large brown terminals at DFW, terminals that were way closer to Fort Worth than Love Field’s were.
When Southwest Airlines began operations and opened their headquarters at Love Field a few years earlier, they wanted to revolutionize air travel within Texas. However, spending as much time in the car driving from Downtown Dallas to the new airport as one might spend in the air flying from Dallas to another Texas city was not considered revolutionary. It was a distance great enough that one airline thought it warranted a flight…