The Short-Lived Dallas Carrier That American Airlines Drove Out of Business Texas Monthly [Video]

Allan McArtor won’t ever forget the day Legend Airlines ran out of gas—literally. He was CEO of the Dallas-based carrier when it went broke in December 2000, after having waged a $20 million legal battle against American Airlines and the City of Fort Worth to secure the right to get off the ground in the first place.

“We had a fuel-purchase contract that we needed to pay,” McArtor, now 81 years old, told me recently from his Virginia home. “Our supplier was fully expecting me to say, ‘Look, we’re going to make it. We’ll get you paid.’ But I wasn’t going to lie to them. So we had to shut things down.”

Legend may have lost its business war, but its legacy lives on. Had the airline never existed, the Wright Amendment—the 1979 federal law that limited flights from Dallas Love Field to destinations within Texas and four contiguous states, …