I would stay away from buying individual company stocks altogether.
Pay a bunch of experts who live sleep and breathe this stuff to do this stuff for you, and in the long run you'll have much better results. In other words buy into mutual funds with a 10-20 year track record of matching or beating the Dow average for that period of time. Don't ever invest money you plan on useing within the next five years, and leave it alone no matter what happens.
Put it this way, if Joe Sixpack wants to fly to MCO to visit Disney world, does he buy a Cessna, read the maunall and fly himself? No, he pays a large group of profesionalls to take care of the thousands of details for him. That group of professionalls has a phenomonal safety record, MUCH better than the part time guys who dabbel in aviation and routinely come to grief.
Same thing with investing, mutual funds are staffed by experts in all the field of investing. You would have to spend 10 years to even aproach the mountains of expertise that these companies have. If you buy and sell on your own, you are just like a PPL who just got thier lisecnse. Except that the sotck market is 1000X more complex than flying.
If you want to "fly yourself" in the stock market keep it small change so you can't lose much money. Stick with the 152, and don't buy a VLJ. Managing you own retirement protfolio will not end well.
If you do buy individual stocks, I would never park money in an airline. Even SWA stock isn't reall great. While it has been stable and not tanked, neither has it grown very quickly.