Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport is a public airport in Arlington County, Virginia, United States, from Washington, D.C. The closest airport to the nation's capital, it is one of two airports owned by the federal government and operated by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) that serve the Washington metropolitan area; the other is Dulles International Airport (IAD), located about to the west in Fairfax and Loudoun counties.
The airport opened in 1941 as Washington National Airport. Part of the original terminal is still in use as Terminal 1; the much larger Terminal 2 opened in 1997. In 1998, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed a bill renaming the airport to honor the fortieth president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, who was in office from 1981 to 1989.
Reagan National serves 108 nonstop destinations as of May 2026. It is a hub for American Airlines. The airport hosts international flights, but has no immigration and customs facilities, restricting routes to those with U.S. Customs and Border Protection preclearance facilities, primarily major airports in Canada and the Caribbean. Reagan National is also home to Coast Guard Air Station Washington.
The twenty-seventh busiest airport in the U.S., the busiest airport in the Washington metropolitan area, and the second busiest in the Washington–Baltimore combined statistical area, the airport served 26.29 million passengers in 2024, an increase of 3.3% over a record set in 2023. The airport's main runway is the busiest in the nation.
In 2025, the airport faced controversy over safety concerns following a spate of incidents.
History 20th century The first airport in the area was Arlington's Hoover Field, which opened in 1926. Near the present site of the Pentagon, its single runway was crossed by a street; guards had to stop automobile traffic during takeoffs and landings. The following year, in 1927, Washington Airport, another privately operated field, began service next door. In 1930, the Great Depression led the two terminals to merge to form Washington-Hoover Airport. Bordered on the east by U.S. Route 1, with its accompanying high-tension electrical wires, and obstructed by a high smokestack on one approach and a dump nearby, the field was inadequate.
The need for a better airport was acknowledged in 37 studies conducted between 1926 and 1938, but a statute prohibited federal development of airports. When Congress lifted the prohibition in 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a recess appropriation of $15 million to build National Airport by reallocating funds from other purposes. Construction of Washington National Airport began in 1940–1941 by a company led by John McShain. Congress challenged the legality of FDR's recess appropriation, but construction of the new airport continued.
The airport is located southwest of Washington, D.C., in the Crystal City section of Arlington County, Virginia, adjacent to National Landing. The western part of the airport was once within a large Virginia plantation, a remnant of which is now inside a historic site near the airport's Metrorail station.See Abingdon (plantation) for history. The eastern part of the airport was built in the District of Columbia on and near mudflats in the tidal Potomac River near Gravelly Point, about from the United States Capitol, using landfill dredged from the Potomac River.
The airport opened June 16, 1941, just before U.S. entry into World War II. The public was entertained by displays of wartime equipment including a captured Japanese Zero war prize flown in with U.S. Navy colors. In 1945 Congress passed a law that established the airport was legally within Virginia, mainly for liquor sales taxation purposes, but under the jurisdiction of the federal government. On July 1 of that year the airport's weather station became the official point for D.C. weather observations and records by the National Weather Service, in Washington, D.C.
Until 1946, nonstop airline flights did not reach beyond New York City, Detroit, Cincinnati, Memphis, Atlanta, and Jacksonville. In 1946, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and Miami were added; nonstops reached Denver in 1951 and Los Angeles in 1954. The April 1957 Official Airline Guide shows 316 weekday departures: 95 Eastern (plus six per week to/from South America), 77 American, 61 Capital, 23 National, 17 TWA, 10 United, 10 Delta, 6 Allegheny, 6 Braniff, 5 Piedmont, 3 Northeast and 3 Northwest. Jet flights began in April 1966 (727-200s were not allowed until 1970).Aviation Daily February 26, 1971, p314 In 1974 the airport's key carriers were Eastern (20 destinations), United (14 destinations after subsuming Capital) and Allegheny (11 destinations).
The grooving of runway 18–36 to improve traction when wet, in March 1967, was the first at a civil airport in the United States.
Service to the airport's Metro station began in 1977.
The Washington National Airport Terminal and South Hangar Line were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. and Accompanying photo
Expansion and restrictions The runway layout has changed little since the 1956 closure of the east–west runway at the south end of the field. Changes to the terminal complex over the years include: Extension of the original Main Terminal (today's Terminal 1) to the south in 1950 The construction of a North Terminal supplemented the original terminal in 1958; construction connected the two terminals in 1961. A United Airlines holdroom complex was built in 1965, a facility for American Airlines was completed in 1968, and a facility for Northwest Airlines and TWA (still in use today as the Terminal A concourse), along with a commuter terminal in 1970. The Metrorail station serving the Airport opened in 1977. A major terminal expansion including a new air traffic control tower, officially called Terminals B/C, opened in 1997 giving the terminal its current configuration. Runways 18/36 and 03/21 were renumbered as 01/19 and 04/22 in 1999 as Earth's magnetic field drifted.https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/airport-runway-names-shift-magnetic-field |November 20, 2017; retrieved on July 6, 2018 In March 2012 the main 01/19 runway was lengthened to add Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) compliant runway safety runoff areas.Runway Projects . Metwashairports.com. Retrieved on August 16, 2013.
Despite the expansions, efforts have been made to restrict the growth of the airport. The advent of jets and traffic growth led Congress to pass the Washington Airport Act of 1950, which led to the opening of Dulles International Airport in 1962. To reduce congestion and drive traffic to alternative airports, the FAA imposed perimeter restrictions on National when jets arrived in 1966, and landing slots at DCA and four other high-density airports in 1969.
The airport originally had no perimeter rule; from 1954 to 1960, piston-engine airliners flew nonstop to California. Scheduled jet airliners were not allowed until April 1966, and concerns about aviation noise led to noise restrictions even before jet service began in 1966.
The perimeter rule was implemented in January 1966 as a voluntary agreement by airlines, to get permission to use short-haul jets at National. Dulles was to continue to serve the long haul markets, limiting traffic and noise at National; the FAA assumed that ground level noise would be reduced because planes would take off light on fuel and be up and away quickly. The agreement limited jet flights to , with 7 grandfathered exceptions under . The spirit of the agreement was regularly violated as flights left National to an airport within the perimeter and then immediately took off for a destination beyond it. Within a year there was a proposal to reduce the perimeter to , but it was widely opposed and never implemented. Overcrowding at National was later managed by the 1969 High Density Rule, thereby removing one of the justifications for the perimeter agreement.
In the 1960s and 1970s, several attempts were made to codify the perimeter rule, but it was not until Dulles was endangered that it actually become a strict rule. In 1970 the FAA lifted the ban at National of the stretched Boeing 727-200, which resulted in a lawsuit by Virginians for Dulles who argued that the airport's jet traffic was a nuisance. That suit resulted in a Court of Appeals order to create an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). In addition to the court order, there were economic problems at Dulles. Following the extension of Metrorail to National in 1977, and airline deregulation in 1978, traffic at Dulles began to plummet while it increased at National. As part of a slate of efforts to protect Dulles, including removing landing fees and mobile lounge user charges, the FAA proposed regulations as part of the EIS to limit traffic at National and maintain Dulles's role as the area's airport for long-haul destinations. In 1980, the FAA proposed codifying the perimeter rule as part of a larger rulemaking effort. When the rule was announced, airlines challenged it in court; the Metropolitan Washington Airports Policy of 1981 codified the perimeter rule on an interim basis "to maintain the long-haul nonstop service at Dulles and BWI which otherwise would preempt shorter haul service at National." At the same time, the perimeter was extended to miles to remove the unfairness of having seven grandfathered cities. The perimeter rule was upheld by the Court of Appeals in 1982. In 1986, as part of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Act, which handed control of National over to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, the perimeter was extended to to allow nonstop flights to Houston with Dallas also being permitted to be served nonstop.
Slots at the airport have been traded in several instances. In 2011 US Airways acquired a number of Delta's slots at Reagan National in exchange for Delta receiving a number of US Airways slots at LaGuardia Airport in New York. JetBlue paid $40 million to acquire eight slot pairs at auction in the same year. JetBlue and Southwest acquired 12 and 27 US Airways slot pairs, respectively, in 2014 as part of a government-mandated divestiture following the merger of US Airways and American.
Transfer of control and renaming
In 1984, the Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole appointed a commission to study transferring National and Dulles Airports from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to a local entity, which could use airport revenues to finance improvements. The commission recommended that one multi-state agency administer both Dulles and National, over the alternative of having Virginia control Dulles and the District of Columbia control National. In 1987 Congress, through legislation,"Metropolitan Washington Airports Act of 1986", Public Law No. 99-500, Section 6001 transferred control of the airport from the FAA to the new Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority with the Authority's decisions being subject to a Congressional review panel. The constitutionality of the review panel was later challenged in the Supreme Court and the Court has twice declared the oversight panel unconstitutional.METROPOLITAN WASHINGTON AIRPORTS AUTHORITY v. CITIZENS FOR THE ABATEMENT OF AIRCRAFT NOISE, INC., 501 U.S. 252 (1991). Even after this decision, however, Congress has continued to intervene in the management of the airports.This can be seen by Congress's continued use of legislation to limit the number of flights at National Airport, as well as expanding the perimeter and number of exemptions for flights outside that limit.