Southwest
plans to launch service between Newark and Baltimore, Denver, Houston and
Phoenix, effective June 5, 2011, following the previously announced March 2011
launch of service from Newark to Chicago and St. Louis.
Southwest
is making use of 18 daily slots relinquished by Continental Airlines as a
condition of its merger with United Airlines. Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said
establishing a Newark presence is "a very important piece of our desire to
strategically add the New York area to our route map. We've got eight dailies
to LaGuardia, we'll be adding now 18 with Newark and, of course, the AirTran acquisition—once we get that closed—will bring us additional LaGuardia
positions as well."