FLYUAA NOV Issue | Page 40

W ashington Dulles International Airport[a] (IATA: IAD, ICAO: KIAD, FAA LID: IAD) is an international airport in Loudoun and Fairfax counties in Virginia, United States, 26 miles (42 km) west of downtown Washington, D.C. The airport serves the Baltimore Washington Metropolitan Area, centered on the District of Columbia. The airport is named after John Foster Dulles, the 52nd Secretary of State who served under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Dulles main terminal is a well-known landmark designed by Eero Saarinen. Operated by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, Dulles Airport occupies 13,000 acres (52.6 km2) straddl ing the Loudoun Fairfax line. Most of the airport is in the unincorporated community of Dulles, in Loudoun County, with a small portion in the unincorporated community of Chantilly in Fairfax County. Dulles is the one of the three major airports in the larger Baltimore Washington metropolitan area with over 21 million passengers a year. With nearly all of the international passenger traffic in the Baltimore-Washington region, Dulles is the busiest international airport in the Mid-Atlantic outside 40| FlyUAA| www.FlyUAA.org| November Issue the New York metropolitan area. On a typical day, more than 60,000 passengers pass through Washington Dulles to and from more than 125 destinations around the world. Prior to World War II, Hoover Field was the main commercial airport serving Washington. It was replaced by Washington National Airport in 1941. 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. The current site was selected by President Dwight D. 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 selection, the unincorporated, largely AfricanAmerican community of Willard, which once stood in the airport’s current footprint, was demolished, and 87 property owners had their holdings condemned. The civil engineering firm Ammann and Whitney was named lead contractor. The airport was dedicated by President John F. Kennedy on November 17, 1962. As originally opened, the airport had three runways (current day runways 1C/19C, 1R/19L, and 12/30). 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. 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 Issue November| www.FlyUAA.org| FlyUAA| 41