AP

Southwest wants to expand flights from Love Field.

WASHINGTON -- Verbal sparring over a 26-year-old law restricting flights from a Dallas regional airport filled an oversized congressional hearing room Thursday, but the Republican chairman of an aviation Senate panel said the issue isn’t going to be resolved soon.

American and Southwest airlines have been exchanging barbs over whether Congress should repeal the Wright Amendment since Southwest launched an offensive last year against it. The hearing was the first in about a decade over the law authored by former House Speaker Jim Wright in 1979, when he was U.S. House majority leader.

When the hearing was finished, panel chairman Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., noted the dueling testimony had made for a “spirited hearing.”

Burns said the fate of the Wright Amendment would take time to decide because it would affect the nation’s aviation system, but the law’s opponents may soon put another dent in it.

Missouri could be the eighth state exempted from the law, Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., said later Thursday in a meeting of House and Senate members brokering a compromise transportation spending bill.

The members included the Missouri exemption in the compromise bill, said a congressional aide who requested anonymity because the bill was not yet public. The bill still must be approved by the House and Senate and signed by the President. Southwest flies to Kansas City and St. Louis.

During some of the testimony, witnesses complained when rivals exceeded the five-minute limit for statements.

During one of the hearing’s livelier moments, Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher leapt from his chair at the witness table— as if he were a lawyer objecting at a trial—and interrupted testimony of Kevin Cox, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport’s chief executive.

Cox was quoting a statement Kelleher made in a deposition, but Kelleher insisted he hadn’t read his full statement.

The Wright Amendment pertains only to Love Field in central Dallas but prevents any airline from flying from that airport beyond Texas, with the exception of four contiguous states and three others. Although it was born of controversy, the law has largely kept the peace between airlines and Dallas and Fort Worth.

Gerard Arpey, chairman and CEO of American and its parent, AMR Corp., said repealing the law would undermine billions of dollars of investment at DFW Airport. He said those investments were made under the premise that Wright would remain in place forever.

Arpey accused Southwest of seeing “a downtown monopoly that would be a windfall for them and certain damage to American Airlines, North Texas and many smaller communities around the country.”

He dismissed arguments that restricting flights at Love Field is anti-competition, arguing that Southwest could move to and compete at DFW Airport—as did all other airlines when Love Field was to be shut down.

“The best free market laboratory I know of is DFW, where we slug it out with a long list of carriers, in dozens of markets, every day. In contrast, Southwest wants to have its cake and eat it too,” Arpey said.

Kelleher scoffed at Arpey’s prediction of job losses and cutbacks in services should the amendment be lifted. He said similar predictions of doom and gloom were made when Southwest went to court to keep Love Field from shutting down.

“You’d have thought we threatened to release the four horsemen of the Apocalypse,” Kelleher said.

Kelleher said he protested “bitterly” when the Wright Amendment was brokered in a conference committee but accepted it after he recognized that the Jim Wright “was the majority leader and I was not.”

“In the ensuing years, DFW has gotten so big that I’m surprised it hasn’t been implicated in the steroids scandal,” he said.

The airport is one of the biggest in the country, and American controls 84 percent of the passenger traffic at DFW “and does not necessarily welcome interlopers with warm milk and graham crackers,” Kelleher said.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and John Ensign, R-Nev., asked American and DFW officials why DFW couldn’t coexist with much smaller Love Field if both are allowed to operate long-haul flights.

“Why can’t DFW compete like San Francisco does with Oakland, like Miami does with Fort Lauderdale, and like Chicago O’Hare does with Midway?” Ensign asked.

Arpey and Cox said local officials decided decades ago it would be best for the regional economy to close Love Field and operate a single strong airport. Cox also said the airports Ensign named are run by the same local government boards and share revenue, while Love Field and DFW are run separately and don’t share proceeds, such as landing fees.

When Arpey and Cox raised the issue that Dallas and Fort Worth had agreed to close their respective local airports to operate DFW, Ensign snapped: “That’s past history. Southwest Airlines won that argument in the courts.”

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said the issue is a local one and “local community leaders should be the ones to come up” with a resolution, but Burns said it might better be resolved in the context of reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration, which would be taken up next year.