Airline · WN
Southwest
United States
AVA Navigate — CC BY-SA 4.0
History
The Story of Southwest
Southwest Airlines was incorporated as Air Southwest Co. in March 1967 by Rollin King and Herb Kelleher, initially designed to operate as an intrastate carrier within Texas to bypass federal Civil Aeronautics Board regulations. Following legal challenges from rival carriers, the airline commenced commercial flight operations on June 18, 1971, utilizing a point-to-point network linking Dallas Love Field, Houston, and San Antonio. Its low-fare business model stimulated high passenger volumes and triggered what economists termed the "Southwest Effect," driving down ticket prices whenever it entered a new market.
Following the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, Southwest expanded regionally into adjacent states and progressively scaled into a national network throughout the 1980s and 1990s. A major milestone occurred in 2011 with the acquisition of AirTran Airways, which integrated a secondary fleet type temporarily and opened international routes into Mexico and the Caribbean. Operating an all-Boeing 737 fleet, Southwest grew to become one of the largest carriers in North America by domestic passengers carried, anchoring its operations around major focus cities such as Dallas, Chicago-Midway, Baltimore, and Denver.
Branding
Livery & Visual Identity
Southwest's visual branding has undergone three major evolutions, consistently characterized by bold, highly saturated color palettes. At launch in 1971, the airline introduced the "Desert Gold" livery featuring a mustard-gold fuselage accented by stripes of red and orange, with the airline title prominently painted across the vertical stabilizer rather than the forward fuselage. In 2001, the carrier transitioned to the "Canyon Blue" paint scheme, replacing the gold fuselage with a deep shade of blue while retaining the red and orange cheatlines and introducing a stylized heart emblem.
The current visual identity, unveiled in 2014, is known as the "Heart" livery. It features a dark blue fuselage, a red tail wrapped with a yellow-and-white ribbon forming a heart symbol on the vertical stabilizer, and the "Southwest" typeface rendered in bold white lettering across the forward fuselage. The airline also maintains numerous special-scheme aircraft featuring state flags and themed commemorative designs.
Safety Record
Notable Safety History
On April 17, 2018, Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, a Boeing 737-700 powered by CFM56-7B engines flying from New York LaGuardia to Dallas Love Field, experienced an uncontained left engine failure while climbing to cruise altitude. A fan blade separated due to a low-cycle fatigue crack in the dovetail region, sending debris that impacted the engine nacelle and caused structural components of the fan cowl to detach. A cowl fragment struck the fuselage near a cabin window, causing the window to blow out and resulting in a rapid cabin depressurization that proved fatal to one passenger. The flight crew executed an emergency descent and landed safely in Philadelphia.
The subsequent National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation determined that the probable cause was the fan blade fatigue fracture that initiated a critical impact on the fan cowl structure. The accident prompted the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to issue multiple safety recommendations regarding engine fan blade inspection methodologies—specifically advocating for high-sensitivity ultrasonic or eddy current inspections rather than visual fluorescent penetrant methods alone—and mandating structural re-evaluations of Boeing 737 engine cowlings to withstand fan-blade-out impact events.
Covers officially investigated accidents only, per aviation safety authorities (NTSB, ICAO or equivalent).