Dullas Airport
Dullas Airport
Washington Dulles International
Airport is a public airport in Dulles, Virginia, 26 miles (41.6 km) west of
downtown Washington, D.C. The airport serves the Baltimore-Washington-Northern
Virginia metropolitan area centered on the District of Columbia. It is named
after John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State under 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 11,830 acres (47.9 km2) straddling the border of Fairfax County and
Loudoun County, Virginia.
It is in two unincorporated communities, Chantilly and Dulles, west of Herndon
and southwest of Sterling. Washington Dulles Airport is the largest airport in
the Washington metropolitan area, and is one of the nation's busiest airports
with over 23 million passengers a year. Daily, more than 60,000 passengers
depart Washington Dulles to more than 125 destinations around the world. Dulles
is the busiest airport in Virginia as well as the busiest in the
Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area.
At the end of World War II, growth in aviation and in the Washington
metropolitan area led Congress to pass the Washington Airport Act of 1950,
providing federal backing for a second airport. After preliminary proposals
failed, including one to establish an international airport at what is now Burke
Lake Park, the current site was selected by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958.
As a result of the selection, the former unincorporated community of Willard,
which once stood in the airport's current footprint, was demolished.
The civil engineering firm Ammann and Whitney was named lead contractor. The
airport was dedicated by President John F. Kennedy on November 17, 1962. 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 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 Taipei, 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 17 miles
(27 km) to the east. (Eventually, the highway system 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 will be in the form of an extension of the Washington Metrorail
and is expected to be completed in 2017.
Text from Wikipedia
