DALLAS — DALLAS - This is an obituary for a guy who hasn't died, a retirement story for a person who hasn't retired, a goodbye for someone who isn't going anywhere.
Chairman Herb Kelleher, 77, chaired his 31st and last Southwest Airlines Co. annual meeting yesterday, ending one of the longest and most colorful tenures for a head of a U.S. airline.
As of today, he's just an ordinary employee of Dallas-based Southwest - if Kelleher can ever be considered ordinary. His $400,000-a-year contract keeps him at Southwest into 2013. It does not state his duties.
And Kelleher says he expects to still be coming to work every day in 2013, when he turns 82.
"I would guess so. I enjoy it. I enjoy work. You can refer to me as a drone, a worker bee. I always have enjoyed it," Kelleher said last week, adding, "I hope I can still be useful."
Kelleher was a 35-year-old San Antonio attorney back in 1966 when a client, businessman Rollin King, brought up the idea of starting an air carrier to fly between major Texas cities.
A year later, King and Kelleher incorporated that airline, Air Southwest, to offer the service. After a four-year legal battle, the renamed Southwest Airlines finally took to the air on June 18, 1971.
If one were to ask Kelleher for the most dangerous period in Southwest's history, he would name the two-year stretch right after its 1971 launch, "when survival was a matter of day-to-day, hand-to-mouth activity on our part."
"There were a lot of things that happened during that time. As you know, we had to sell one of our four airplanes to get enough cash to keep going," Kelleher says.
But for the industry as a whole, Kelleher sees the current period as the most dangerous - and this from an airline veteran who was there during the 1974 oil embargo, the 1979 Iranian revolution, the early 1980s recession, the 1990-91 fuel price spike and national recession and the industry's collapse after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The difference now is that oil prices in general and jet fuel prices in particular are putting unprecedented strains on airlines' finances, he said.
"This situation with fuel prices as high as they are obviously is a threat to the entire industry and probably worldwide," Kelleher said. "We've got to find some way to get around it."
Airlines are cutting the number of seats and flights so that they can force fares higher, a prospect that bothers Kelleher "from a philosophical point of view."
