Biography|Gary C. Kelly — Southwest Hired the Controller Beside This Field

People treat 1986 as a year the airline already ran on instinct. That year it hired a thirty-one-year-old CPA to keep the books.

Kelly had audited at Arthur Young in Dallas. He then served as controller at Systems Center, later folded into Sterling Software in Irving.

The Wall Street Transcript later recorded the Southwest start as June 1986. Company biographies and a later congressional resume agree on the controller title and the year.

Headquarters then sat in the 1820 Regal Row offices beside Love Field, not yet in the 1990 campus on Love Field Drive. The field itself was already the company's public face.

He arrived as controller. Three years later the board made him vice president of finance and chief financial officer, at thirty-four.

The runway outside was the same one Southwest had refused to abandon when Dallas-Fort Worth Airport opened in 1974. The new hire's job was to keep that bet solvent.

In the late 1990s he helped build the fuel-hedging book that later spared the carrier during oil spikes. That work still sat on this field, not on Wall Street.

The 737 on the ramp is the machine the books had to pay for. Love Field remains the address the ticker symbol LUV points back to.

Photo: WhisperToMe, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons