Southwest Launches Dulles Service

Southwest celebrated its inaugural flights from Dulles Airport this morning with a boisterous, campaign rally-style party featuring company mascots and a walking caricature of President Bush, spotted as an oversized head.

The no-frills, low-fare airline started service from Dulles today with 12 daily nonstop flights to Chicago, Las Vegas, Orlando and Tampa Bay. It also offers direct or connecting flights to 35 other cities, including Denver and Los Angeles. Southwest, which will employ about 40 local workers, will occupy two gates in the B Concourse on the western end of the airport.

Among the first passengers to take advantage of the new service at Dulles were a group of five friends who were traveling to Las Vegas for a weekend getaway. "We were looking around online and found their special to Vegas," Burke resident Paul Lee said, adding that they chose Southwest because it offered the lowest fare. Two others in his group, Jane Breboneria and John Santiago of Maryland, decided to go with Southwest's service from Dulles rather than Baltimore Washington International because their other three friends lived in the area, they said.

One floor below, Southwest employees from Dulles, Baltimore and Dallas had donned political convention garb for the airline's "LUV Party," named for the company's ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange (LUV) and a reference to its base in Dallas' Love Field.

Standing below red, white and blue balloons waiting to drop from a net hung from the ceiling, the airline workers cheered loudly before the welcome speeches by James "Jim" Bennett, president and CEO of Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, and Gary Kelly, Southwest CEO.

"I'm delighted Southwest has chosen Dulles for its second Virginia city and its 63rd city in its system," said Bennett, who offered a historical perspective of the airport. "Dulles was not much more, 44 years ago, than a vision of a great airport out here in the middle of the dairy fields of Northern Virginia. In its first full year of operations, which was 1963, there were only about 666,000 passengers that went through this airport. ... Dulles has now become the largest airport in the metropolitan Washington region."

Kelly, meanwhile, praised Bennett for his efforts in courting the airline to Dulles, telling the audience, "I can assure you if it were not for Jim Bennett, I don't know that we would be here."

Bennett, Kelly said, "convinced us that we needed to be at Dulles. We look for airports that are very well run. We look for airports that are efficient. We look for airports that are low-cost. And we just didn't understand that Dulles met all those criteria."