Herb Kelleher and Rollin King incorporated Air Southwest in 1967, planning to offer flights only within Texas in order to circumvent federal regulation by the Civil Aeronautics Board which kept prices high and limited service.
Braniff, Trans-Texas and Continental Airlines sued to stop the plan, and Air Southwest didn’t win the right to actually fly until the end of 1970.
At the beginning of 1971 they recruited Lamar Muse to run the airline. Of course at the time it wasn’t yet an airline, it had no assets plenty of unpaid legal bills.
The first task was to generate cash and their plan was to raise $1.25 million in debt financing before even selecting aircraft. And over half of that initial debt — $750,000 — was committed by Wesley West, a Texas rancher, oilman, and friend of former President Lyndon Johnson’s. West joined the airline’s board at its next meeting.
When Lamar Muse met with West on a Friday afternoon to pitch the idea, West immediately took ‘the amount that was left’ in the debenture offering. Muse was to pick up the check at West’s home two days later on Sunday morning. They had breakfast that Sunday morning, and Muse recounts in his autobiography that there were two topics of conversation about the airline.
but only if a hole could be cut out of the top of it where they could install a pressurized, clear plastic chamber. It would be big enough for at least two seats that could be hoisted through the opening on some kind of elevator so their occupants could scan Heaven from 40,000 feet up.
Muse told him “that this would be a real engineering challenge and that only Boeing could discuss it intelligently with him.” Muse didn’t say no.
In other words Southwest could have become Judah 1 instead of the largest carrier of domestic passengers of any US airline.
