See Southwest Airlines' new $250 million addition to fast-growing Love Field campus

Southwest Airlines unveiled a new six-story facility near Love Field Tuesday that will house many of its flight operations, the latest addition to a rapidly growing corporate campus that has transformed along with the carrier over the last decade.

“Welcome to Wings,” Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said Tuesday, referencing the building’s name to a crowd of employees gathered in the lobby.

The $250 million project, which includes an attached pilot-training center, is located across Denton Drive from Southwest’s main headquarters building and Love Field. It joins a cluster of other buildings on the campus that has been built out over the last six years and now covers 1.3 million square feet.

Kelly said the rapid growth of Southwest’s campus reflects the company’s journey since the Wright Amendment reforms were passed in 2006, setting the carrier on a path that saw many of the restrictions at Love Field lifted in 2014.

“We’ve come a long way in Dallas in a relatively short period of time,” he said. “Starting five or six years ago, we decided we needed to invest more. And we wanted to invest, here, in our hometown.”

The expanded campus was needed to help house Southwest’s booming workforce that now numbers about 60,000 employees, nearly double its headcount from 2006.

More than 10,000 of those employees are based in Dallas, including corporate staff, flight crews, airport and ground operations workers.

The 414,000 square foot Wings building will have office and training space for 2,200 employees from departments including flight operations, flight-operations training, regulatory and compliance, some technology functions and more.

The interiors feature large, open break rooms on each floor that the company refers to as its culture centers, along with Southwest memorabilia and displays that chart the carrier’s growth from a small airline that flew only within the state of Texas to the country’s largest domestic carrier.

The Wings building is attached to the company’s Leadership Education and Aircrew Development Center, in operation since last year, which serves as the home of a dozen flight simulators and a hub for more than 8,000 new and veteran pilots who pass through each year to receive training and certification.

It sits between Denton Drive and Harry Hines Boulevard near two other recently constructed buildings -- one a 500,000 square foot facility that includes Southwest Airlines University and other training functions, as well as customer relations and other office space; the other the company’s network operations center, which serves as the central command for the carrier’s day-to-day operations.

To help connect the increasingly sprawling campus that now covers 2.2 million square feet, Southwest constructed an elevated 1,145 foot pedestrian bridge that winds between buildings on both sides of the street.

Employees will begin moving into the Wings building over the coming weeks. Kelly said the Wings building is the last piece of the campus currently planned, although additional construction may occur to expand the number of flight training simulators it can hold in the future.

“There will be ongoing work that we’ll want to do. We’ll just see what our growth is,” Kelly said. “At least for the immediate future, this should meet our needs.”