Love Field is Growing, but Limited. Here’s How the North Texas Airport is Going to do It

Dallas Love Field is at a “breaking point,” said airport director Patrick Carreno, as the air hub and headquarters for Southwest Airlines faces a booming local population with an appetite for travel and restrictions on adding more gates.

But the urban airfield with 17 million annual passengers is facing more challenges than just a constrained number of flights. There are long lines at the one security checkpoint at the airport, lines to large concessionaires like Chick-fil-A or even just a line of cars stretched out to Mockingbird Lane to enter.

“We’re very challenged right now,” Carreno said. “We like to say everything’s kind of reached its breaking point.”

Dallas Love Field leaders are working on a 20-year “master plan” to address the growth issues along with a host of emerging priorities for the air travel industry, including sustainability initiatives, electric air taxis and artificial intelligence. Carreno knows his airport is a part of a resilient industry, constantly evolving.

“The terminal has really been beyond capacity not long after they opened it,” Carreno said. “Nobody expected the growth. I don’t think any of us could have predicted the growth.”

To get there, Love Field is taking inventory of what space it has now and how it can utilize its space. The airport, owned and operated by the city, is restricted by a five-party agreement that limits the growth of Love Field for critical pieces of the airport such as gates and infrastructure. The Federal Aviation Administration also recommends airports complete master plans every seven to 10 years and Love Field’s last plan was created roughly nine years ago.

Today, the airport faces severe constraints, challenges to its roadways and a major airline customer with the opportunity to expand elsewhere. The airport’s top leader said it’s time to get creative when considering the future.

“It’s trying to do our best to predict those and prepare ourselves for the next 20-plus years, and that’s why we’re doing things now,” said Carreno, who’s been with the airport for about three years. “[The master plan was created] so we’re not coming back in 2040, or 2050, and saying, ‘Oh, wait a minute. What do we do?’”

Navigating the constraints

One of the key problems Love Field faces in growing is a gate cap under the revised Wright Amendment, a law that places certain rules on the airport. No other airport in the country has a gate cap, according to Carreno. He said the airport has some of the highest gate utilization in the country.

It’s already dealt with issues regarding the ownership of gates among the airlines. In 2022, the airport dealt with a settlement in a seven-year legal battle with Delta Air Lines and Southwest over the limited gates.

To prepare for the future, it must be “very managed,” according to Bruce Bleakley, an aviation historian who has penned books on Love Field.

“As long as we’re still restricted to 20 gates ... that’s going to take some close coordination,” Bleakley said.

Those restrictions could harm the airport in the early 2030s when the airport is projecting 24 million passengers a year. There are several factors that play into how Love Field reaches those numbers while having a gate cap, including air carrier load factors, fleet types, average seats per departure and more.

“I think the airport as a whole, from the airlines, particularly Southwest, American, Delta, the stakeholders, they all do a really good job of operating in a constrained environment,” Carreno said. “How do we continue to do that safely and efficiently? How do we do the new stuff without impacting that operation? That’s really what our team is focused on right now.”

There are some “triggers” to the law, according to Carreno, that still exist.

Come 2025, one component of the Wright Amendment will expire, allowing Southwest to expand in North Texas without giving up gates at Love Field. Southwest has long preferred Love Field as its North Texas airport, not only because of the legal restrictions but because it’s only a few feet from its corporate headquarters on the southwest side of the airport. The airline has already said it’s eying a “modest presence” at DFW International Airport’s sixth terminal. It’s also pulling back on flights at key airports like Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Chicago-O’Hare International Airport, displacing some crew members.

“Southwest will probably want to always have a presence here, I would think,” Carreno said. “If not, I think there’s a lot of people that would be interested.”

According to a Southwest spokesperson, the airline’s top priority in North Texas is securing its long-term future at Love Field. It has also participated in workshops and the drafting of the master plan, according to the airline.

Issues stretch beyond the terminal

The congestion issues only start in the terminal. Roads around the urban airport are congested, something beyond the control of the airport. And even the traffic within the airport property is challenging.

The airport has presented plans to City Council that have included a north entrance with a direct connection to Interstate 35. In 2019, the airport went to City Council with an idea to come up with a plan to redesign the roadway. However, those plans, easier said than done, haven’t come to fruition.

There are some critical pieces to the master plan in Carreno’s mind. It includes parking, the terminal and even the streets passengers drive on to enter the airport.

He said it’s important that TxDOT and partners are involved in the master plan process noting the high volume of traffic arriving into Mockingbird Lane, calling the intersection “very challenging” for travelers on a crunch of time trying to make a flight.

Another problem for Love Field is the rental car facility, where travelers can also see congestion caused by rideshare or other transportation network companies. Carreno said there are some questions as to relocating its facility, which is located to the southeast of the terminals and parking garages, or figuring out other plans for how to operate.

Rideshare was Love Field’s most controversial change this year when the airport decided to relocate Uber, Lyft and taxi pickups to an adjacent garage requiring a 10-minute walk out of the terminal. Last week, the city said that “feedback has continuously indicated extreme dissatisfaction despite valiant customer service efforts and wayfinding resources” and that it would relocate the rideshare pickup to an area between the terminal and Garage C.

Sustainability is also an immediate issue with Love Field, according to Carreno. Airport leaders are concerned about its environmental footprint and evaluating ways to change it in the future. He said the airport is trying to look at itself as a “mini city in itself.”

“There’s a lot of discussion on AI and data centers and the power that’s going to take,” Carreno explained. “What does the grid look like? From the airport [we want to know], ‘How do we make that more resilient? Do we put inefficient chillers and things like that? Do we go and start to look at things like microgrids that a lot of airports are doing? How is that connecting to our neighborhood? There’s a lot of questions that we have.”

Steve Klein, a representative with Love Field’s group of community stakeholders said while the stakeholders have remained concentrated on rising aircraft noise and the persistence of the airport’s voluntary noise curfew, the master plan is still a critical piece of the puzzle.

“It’s obvious that the airport as it’s currently designed, can’t really handle that increase in passengers,” Klein said. “They’re telling us that a lot of that is going to be absorbed in terms of additional aircraft capacity and possibly larger aircraft. Mainly, the narrative we’ve heard is that they’re talking about increasing the capacity of the aircraft, but there’s really no escaping that the end result is going to be an increase in flight frequency.”

Increasing the volume of passengers at Love Field would prove challenging for an already booming airport. In 2023, 17.5 million people flew out of and into the airport.

“The fight that we find in terms of the future of Love Field is a future where community noise concerns remain top of mind,” Klein said.

An updated home for Southwest

There’s no question the largest customer at Love Field is Southwest.

The Dallas-based airline is undergoing a whirlwind of changes beyond the changes of its hometown airport. In June, an activist investor disclosed a minority stake in the company and demanded the airline make a series of changes to deliver a return for shareholders. Some of those changes include assigned seating and, in turn, changes to the boarding process.

Carreno said he hasn’t had conversations with the airline yet about what that would look like. His focus remains on evaluating the terminal area and how to expand Love Field’s existing space.

Ultimately, Carreno knows the airport is a big economic driver for the region, with nearly 30,000 employees. It comes at a time where, just across the metroplex, DFW Airport is also preparing for major updates and changes to its existing terminals.

What keeps Carreno awake at night is allowing for the growth of such a massive engine for North Texas, while also being mindful of everyone involved, he said.

“We can’t make decisions in a vacuum, because we have neighbors right there, and we need to listen and hear what they’re thinking,” Carreno said.

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