rictions on Southwest Airlines. Further, by the late-1970s, airline deregulation threatened to change the face of competition in the air transportation industry, and major carriers, such as American Airlines, also were focused on limiting the operations for low-cost carriers such as Southwest Airlines (Vietor 76-77).
There was more behind the Wright Amendment, however, than an intent to place restrictions on Southwest Airlines. In the late-1970s, a major new airport, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, opened to serve the north-central Texas metropolitan area encompassing Dallas, Fort Worth, and the surrounding urban area. The new airport is somewhat closer to Fort Worth than it is to Dallas, and Fort Worth was more dependent than Dallas on the economic benefits generated by the new airport because it did not have either the industrial base or the corporate offices base that generated economic benefits equal to those accruing to Dallas from those sources. Thus, F
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