Dulles International Airport
Washington Dulles International Airport – commonly known simply as Dulles Airport – is an international airport serving the United States's capital city, Washington, D.C. and its surrounding area. It is located west of downtown Washington, D.C., in Loudoun and Fairfax counties in Northern Virginia.
Opened in 1962, the airport is named after John Foster Dulles, an influential secretary of state during the Cold War who briefly represented New York in the United States Senate. Operated by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, Dulles occupies ; IAD ranks third in the United States in terms of land area, after Denver International Airport and Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. The "striking" and "iconic" Eero Saarinen-designed Main Terminal received vast acclaim for its innovative architecture when it was completed and has gone on to win numerous awards.
Dulles is the second busiest of three major airports serving the Washington–Baltimore metropolitan area, behind Baltimore/Washington International Airport and ahead of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. As of 2024, it is the 24th-busiest airport in the United States, with 27.3 million enplanements. It had more than 20 million passenger enplanements every year from 2004 to 2019. An average of 60,000 passengers pass through Dulles daily to and from more than 139 destinations around the world. Dulles has the most international passenger traffic of any airport in the Mid-Atlantic outside the New York metropolitan area, including approximately 90% of the international passenger traffic in the Baltimore–Washington region.
Dulles is a hub for United Airlines, and it is frequently used by Star Alliance members that United has codeshare agreements with. Dulles is also a hub for regional operators Mesa, GoJet, and CommuteAir, which operate under the United Express brand.
History
Origins
Before World War II, Hoover Field was the main commercial airport serving Washington, on the site now occupied by the Pentagon and its parking lots. It was replaced by Washington National Airport in 1941, a short distance southeast. After the war, in 1948, the Civil Aeronautics Administration began to consider sites for a second major airport to serve the nation's capital. Congress passed the Washington Airport Act in 1950 to provide funding for a new airport in the region. The initial CAA proposal in 1951 called for the airport to be built in Fairfax County near what is now Burke Lake Park, but protests from residents, as well as the rapid expansion of Washington's suburbs during the time, led to reconsideration of this plan. One competing plan called for the airport to be built in the Pender area of Fairfax County, while another called for the conversion of Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George's County, Maryland, into a commercial airport.The current site was selected by President Eisenhower in 1958; the Dulles name was chosen by Eisenhower's aviation advisor Pete Quesada, who later served as the first head of the Federal Aviation Administration. As a result of the site selection, the unincorporated, largely African-American community of Willard, which once stood in the airport's current footprint, was demolished, and 87 property owners had their holdings condemned.
Dulles was also built over a lesser-known airport named Blue Ridge Airport, chartered in 1938 by the U.S. The airport was Loudoun County's first official airport, consisting of two grass intersecting runways in the shape of an "X". The location of the former Blue Ridge Airport sits where the Dulles Air Freight complex and Washington Dulles Airport Marriott now sit today.
Design and construction
The civil engineering firm Ammann and Whitney was named lead contractor. The airport was dedicated by President John F. Kennedy and Eisenhower on November 17, As originally opened, the airport had three long runways and one shorter one. Its original name, Dulles International Airport, was changed in 1984 to Washington Dulles International Airport.The main terminal was designed in 1958 by famed Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, and it is highly regarded for its graceful beauty, suggestive of flight. The terminal was built without any concourses and gates as all aircraft were parked at remote sites. Passengers were bussed to their aircraft by way of mobile lounges that raised up to the aircraft level; some are still in use today. The first midfield terminal that included gates and jetbridges was constructed in 1985 when New York Air and other airlines began hub operations at Dulles. In the 1990s, the main terminal at Dulles was reconfigured to allow more space between the front of the building and the ticket counters. Additions at both ends of the main terminal more than doubled the structure's length. The original terminal at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport in Taoyuan, Taiwan, was modeled after the Saarinen terminal at Dulles.
The design included a landscaped man-made lake to collect rainwater, a low-rise hotel, and a row of office buildings along the north side of the main parking lot. The design also included a two-level road in front of the terminal to separate arrival and departure traffic and a federally owned limited access highway connecting the terminal to the Capital Beltway about to the east; the highway system eventually grew to include a parallel toll road to handle commuter traffic and an extension to connect to I-66. The access road had a wide median strip to allow the construction of a passenger rail line, which opened as an extension of the Washington Metro's Silver Line on November 15, 2022.
Later developments
By 1985 the original design, featuring mobile lounges to meet each plane, was no longer well-suited to Dulles's role as a hub airport. Instead, midfield concourses were constructed to allow passengers to walk between connecting flights without visiting the main terminal. Mobile lounges were still used for international flights and to transport passengers between the midfield concourses and the main terminal; Concourse C/D was the first to be built, followed by Concourse A/B. A tunnel that links the main terminal and Concourse B was opened in 2004. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority began a renovation program for the airport including a new security mezzanine with more room for lines.A new train system, dubbed AeroTrain and developed by Mitsubishi, began in 2010 to transport passengers between the concourses and the main terminal. The system, which uses rubber tires and travels along a fixed underground guideway, is similar to the people mover systems at Singapore Changi Airport, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and Denver International Airport. The train is intended to replace the mobile lounges, which many passengers found crowded and inconvenient. The initial phase includes the main terminal station, a permanent Concourse A station, a permanent Concourse B station, a permanent midfield concourse station, and a maintenance facility. Mobile lounges continue to serve Concourse D from both the main terminal and Concourse A. Even after AeroTrain is built out and the replacement Concourses C and D are built, the mobile lounges and plane mates will still continue to be used, to transport international arriving passengers to the International Arrivals Building, as well as transport passengers to aircraft parked on hardstands without direct access to jet bridges. Dulles has stated that the wait time for a train does not exceed four minutes, compared to the average 15-minute wait and travel time for mobile lounges.
Under the development plan, future phases would see the addition of several new midfield concourses and a new south terminal. A fourth runway opened in 2008, and development plans include a fifth runway to parallel the existing runway 12–30. If this runway is built, the current runway will be re-designated as 12L-30R while the new runway will be designated 12R-30L. An expansion of the B concourse, used by many low-cost airlines as well as international arrivals, has been completed, and the building housing Concourses C and D will eventually be knocked down to make room for a more ergonomic building. Because Concourses C and D are temporary concourses, the only way to get to those concourses is via moving walkway from the Concourse C station, which is built in the location of the future gates and Concourse D by mobile lounge from the main terminal.
In the short term, United Airlines has constructed a buildout on Concourse C between gate C18 and the AeroTrain entrance for use as a Polaris Lounge for international passengers. Further expansion plans include a new three-story south concourse building above the AeroTrain station for Concourse C, to replace Concourse A regional gates built in 1999.
Decades-old rules set by Congress that limit the number of takeoffs and landings, as well as distance of routes, at Reagan Airport were intended in part to keep more flights at Dulles. Those rules have been weakened by Congress over the years, however, causing Dulles to lose 200,000 passengers to Reagan between 2011 and 2013.
In 2023, construction started on a 100 MW solar power facility, battery and bus charging equipment. It would include the largest airport-based solar and battery development in the U.S. as part of an agreement with Dominion Energy. The solar panels would cover more than on land, equivalent to the consumption of more than 37,000 Northern Virginia homes during peak production.
Operations and milestones
Early years
The first scheduled flight at Dulles was an Eastern Air Lines Lockheed L-188 Super Electra from Newark International Airport in New Jersey on November 19, 1962. The first scheduled transatlantic nonstop flight to serve the airport commenced just shy of two years later, in June 1964.Dulles was initially considered a white elephant, being far out of town with few flights; in 1965, Dulles averaged 89 airline operations a day while National Airport averaged 600 despite not allowing jets. Airport operations grew along with Virginia suburbs and the Dulles Technology Corridor; perimeter and slot restrictions at National forced long-distance flights to use Dulles. In 1969, Dulles had 2.01 million passengers while National had 9.9 million.