Washington Dulles International Airport ( ; ) is the primary international airport serving Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. 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 fourth in the United States in terms of land area, after Denver International Airport, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, and Southwest Florida International Airport. Its Eero Saarinen-designed Main Terminal has received acclaim and awards for its architecture.
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.
In 2025, IAD Airport set an all-time record with 29,008,839 passengers served, a 6.4% increase over 2024.
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.
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 (current day runways 1C/19C, 1R/19L, and 12/30) and one shorter one (where current taxiway Q is located). 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 (I-495) 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 (consisting of a passenger walkway and moving sidewalks) that links the main terminal and Concourse B was opened in 2004. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) 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 (with access to the current temporary C concourse via a tunnel with moving walkways), and a maintenance facility.
Under the development plan, future phases would see the addition of several new midfield concourses and a new south terminal. A fourth runway (parallel to the existing runways 1 and 19 L&R) 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.FAA Air Traffic Activity, Calendar Year 1965 p42
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 (now Reagan) 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.
Growth
The era of wide-body jets began in 1970, when First Lady Pat Nixon christened a Pan Am Boeing 747-100 at Dulles in the presence of Pan Am chairman Najeeb Halaby. Rather than a traditional champagne bottle, red, white, and blue water was sprayed on the aircraft. Pan Am's first Boeing 747 flight was from New York–JFK to London Heathrow Airport.
The day after Christmas 1973, President Richard Nixon flew from Dulles to Los Angeles on board a United Airlines McDonnell Douglas DC-10 commercial flight instead of on Air Force One. This was due to a nationwide fuel shortage caused at the time by the Arab oil embargo.New York Times December 27, 1973 Less than two years later, on May 24, 1976, supersonic flights between the U.S. and Europe began with the arrival of a British Airways Concorde from London–Heathrow and an Air France Concorde from Paris–Charles De Gaulle; both planes were lined nose-to-nose at Dulles for photos.
In 1983, the Space Shuttle Enterprise arrived at Dulles atop a modified Boeing 747 after touring Europe and before returning to Edwards Air Force Base. Two years later Enterprise returned and was placed in a storage hangar near Runway 12/30 to await construction of a planned expansion to the National Air and Space Museum. Enterprise left Dulles in 2012 for its new home at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City.
In 1985, New York Air began a small hub operation at Dulles, with 35 daily flights to eight cities in Florida and the northeastern United States. Colgan Airways became a feeder carrier for New York Air with additional service to smaller cities known as New York Air Connection. In 1987, the airline merged into Continental Airlines, which maintained the hub operation until 1989.OAG June 1, 1985, edition Also in 1985, Presidential Airways opened its hub at the airport, and it soon began a series of code-shares – first with Pan Am from mid-1986 through early 1988, then as Continental Express on behalf of Continental Airlines between mid-1987 and mid-1988, and finally as United Express, on behalf of United Airlines, from mid 1988 until Presidential ceased operations on December 5, 1989.OAG multiple editions 1985-1989
United hub years, 1986 – present