Whether your a SouthWest fan or not you’ve got to admire chairman Herb Kelleher, 77, who will chair his 31st and last Southwest Airlines Co. annual meeting Wednesday, ending one of the longest and most colorful tenures for a head of a U.S. airline.

As of Thursday, he’ll just be an ordinary employee of Dallas-based Southwest – if Mr. Kelleher can ever be considered ordinary. His $400,000-a-year contract keeps him at Southwest into 2013. It does not state his duties.

And Mr. Kelleher says he expects to still be coming to work every day in 2013, when he turns 82.

“I would guess so. I enjoy it. I enjoy work. You can refer to me as a drone, a worker bee. I always have enjoyed it,” Mr. Kelleher said Friday, adding, “I hope I can still be useful.”

Just for comparison take a look at what’s changed with SouthWest from 1978 until today.

Category                           1978         2007
Airplanes                             13            520
Employees                          1,119         33,261
Net income                       $17 million  $645 million
Destinations                           9             64
States of operation                  1             33
Average flight distance            235 miles    629 miles
Average passenger trip distance    297 miles    815 miles
Annual passengers                3.5 million  101.9 million
Average fare                       $21.99       $106.60

Hewlett-Packard Co. has agreed to buy Electronic Data Systems Corp. for about $12.6 billion in cash to build a technology-services company that could challenge IBM.

JetBlue founder David Neeleman revealed the name for his new low-cost Brazilian airline yesterday.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise as the name that was chosen was Azul, which means blue in Portuguese.

The name came from a naming contest that had over 157,000 entries from 108,000 different people.
The final vote came from Neeleman’s camp in choosing Azul while Samba actually had more votes.
Regardless of the name lets hope Azul can be the great success that jetBlue has been in the U.S.

Go get em Azul!