Southwest Airlines opened a new 240,000-square-foot hangar at Houston Hobby Airport on Wednesday, making it the Dallas-based airline’s largest aircraft maintenance facility anywhere.
The hangar is the base for Southwest’s growing technical operations group in Houston, which has 400 employees. It can hold up to six 737 aircraft indoors, and there’s room for another eight planes outside. Houston is key to Southwest’s growing Central America network and a connecting point for destinations such as Cancun, Mexico; Liberia, Costa Rica; and Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic.
Southwest has nearly 200 departures a day from Hobby and serves about 70 destinations throughout North America, Latin America and the Caribbean.
“This state-of-the-art hangar will support our Technical Operations Team’s unwavering commitment to safety and maintaining our fleet to the highest standards,” Southwest Airlines chairman and CEO Gary Kelly said a statement.
Dallas has the largest number of Southwest Airlines maintenance workers, Southwest spokesman Dan Landson said.
With the new hangar in Houston and two under construction in Denver and Baltimore, Southwest will have eight major maintenance facilities nationwide. It also has a handful of maintenance workers at nearly every airport the airline flies.
But Houston is of growing importance as Southwest expands outside the United States and into new destinations in Central America.
Hobby is the seventh-largest airport for Southwest by passengers and flights a day, according to travel website The Points Guy and data company Diio by Cirium.
It ranks just behind Dallas Love Field, which is sixth in each category. Chicago Midway Airport and Denver are Southwest’s busiest airports, followed by Baltimore, Las Vegas and Phoenix.
But Hobby, unlike Dallas Love Field, has room to grow. Dallas Love Field is restrained to 20 gates by federal and state laws originally crafted in the 1970s. Southwest controls 16 gates there and is fighting in court for two more.
Southwest is also investing in its hometown of Dallas. It announced plans in October for a major expansion of its pilot training center on its corporate headquarters campus. And as 2019 closed, it bought another 3 acres next to that future pilot training building.
The new hangar at Houston Hobby Airport will use about 140,000 square feet of space for aircraft maintenance and 100,000 square feet for offices, parts storage and other support areas, according to the building’s contractor, St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos..
It will also contain a “wash rack” to clean airplanes as well as space for two more washing stations in the future.
Construction on the hangar began in 2017.
