the golden years: dulles airport's 50th anniversary

NOVEMBER 30, 2012 L E E S B U R G T O D A Y 35D U L L E S A I R P O R T 5 0 T H A N N I V E R S A R YNOVEMBER 23, 2012 D U L L E S A I R P O R T 5 0 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y 1NOVEMBER 23, 2012 D U L L E S A I R P O R T 5 0 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y 1

Courtesy of Howard Lansat Potography

Courtesy of Joseph GiulianiCourtesy of Charles L. Waddell Courtesy of the Rust Archive, Thomas Balch Library, Leesburg

W a s h i n g t o n D u l l e s I n t e r n a t i o n a l A i r p o r t C e l e b r a t e s 5 0 Y e a r s

GoldenYEARS

36 L E E S B U R G T O D A Y NOVEMBER 30, 2012D U L L E S A I R P O R T 5 0 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y2 D U L L E S A I R P O R T 5 0 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y NOVEMBER 29, 2012

Margaret MortonStaff Writer

It was after the Second World War that “President Eisenhower decided to plunk down an airport in the middle of a cow

field in Loudoun County,” in the words of the late Loudoun mover and shaker B. Powell Harrison. That decision by the administration and Congress to construct a second airport for the capital area led to the opening in 1962 of one of the most beauti-ful airports in the world.

Washington National Airport, built in 1941, was increasingly unable to handle the ever-growing air traffic. The Second Washington Airport Act of 1950 authorized the construction of an additional airport in the capital area.

Eero Saarinen & Associates of Hamden, CT, was selected as architect for the project, with Ammann & Whitney of New York as prime contractor. Construction began Sept. 2, 1958.

From the beginning, Saarinen wanted to create an airport with soul. He was not alone in thinking it was “the best thing I’ve ever done,” as passengers from the first moment the airport opened in 1962 to today speak reverently of the soaring sweep and simple elegance of the building, topped by its distinctive, 193-foot-high glass enclosed control tower.

Named after Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the airport was unlike any other in America, or indeed anywhere in the world. Saarinen designed the 600-foot-long by 200-foot-wide structure to accommodate an expansion of up to 320 feet at either end—a design that was completed seamlessly 34 years later in 1996.

Construction began in 1958 at the 10,000-acre site assembled from a number of farms straddled on either side of the Fairfax/Lou-doun line. It was the first airport designed to accommodate com-mercial jets in the country.

Not only beautiful but also revolutionary in concept, by the time construction was complete, 11.5 million cubic yards of earth had been excavated and two north-south parallel runways 11,500 feet long and 150 feet wide and a third, 10,000-foot long northwest-southwest runway built.

Now being phased out, Dulles’ mobile lounges that ferried passengers to the planes were unique in 1962. The lounge buses could carry 102 passengers and made the airport very user friendly. From the terminal doors to the lounges, passengers had only to walk 200 feet—a far cry from today’s much longer distance to the outer terminals.

And for pas-sengers landing at Dulles, the slow ride to the terminal allowed the wonder of the majestic building to sink ever deeper into their consciousness. Some have likened their sense of awe to that experienced by the first sight of a great medieval cathedral.

There is one man in Loudoun who was there almost “at the creation” and who championed its needs in the crucial early period. Former Loudoun Supervisor and State Sen. Charles L. Waddell, then an employee with American Airlines, was transferred from National Airport to Dulles just four months after its dedication Nov. 17, 1962.

The 80-year-old Waddell, who retired in 2002 from his last public service stint as Virginia Secretary of Transportation, recalled being there when President John F. Kennedy officially opened the airport, with Eisenhower, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, FAA Administrator “Jeeb” Halaby and Virginia Gov. Albertis Harrison, along with a host of other dignitaries.

After handling all aspects of the airline’s operations at Dulles, including as passenger service manager, Waddell entered public service in 1967, first as a county supervisor, then as a state sena-tor. Waddell would play prominent roles in helping shape crucial

Dulles Marks 50 YearsFormer ‘Cow Field’ Fuels Northern Virginia Economic Growth

These aerial photographs taken by Wetland Studies and Solu-tions Inc. depict the growth along the Dulles Corridor through the decades. The outlined area shows the perimeter of Washing-ton Dulles International Airport.

1937 1962 1977

1988

1994

2002

2012

Former state Sen. Charles Waddell, shown below as American Airlines ramp manager in 1965, took this early photo of Dulles International Airport.

NOVEMBER 30, 2012 L E E S B U R G T O D A Y 37D U L L E S A I R P O R T 5 0 T H A N N I V E R S A R YNOVEMBER 29, 2012 D U L L E S A I R P O R T 5 0 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y 3

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ONLY CANDIDATES WHO APPLY ONLINE AT OUR WEBSITE WILL BE CONSIDERED!

Apply

Apply TODAY!

Air Wisconsin, a leader in the regional airline industry, is looking for

Passenger Service Agents

at the Dulles, VA airport!

www.airwis.com

Currently seeking Part-Time and Full-Time PSAs:

Passenger Service Agents (PSAs) perform RAMP operations, which include:

Loading/unloading baggage Cleaning inside of aircraft Directing aircraft movement. Working outside in all types of weather conditions. Initial wage is $9.75 per hour – annual increases according to union

contract Requirements:

Valid and unrestricted driver’s license Minimum of 18 years of age Must be able to provide proof of eligibility to work in the U.S. Ability to lift up to 50 pounds without assistance and up to 100 pounds

with assistance, bend, kneel and squat repeatedly Must be able to fluently speak, read, write and understand English Basic math skills Availability to attend 3 full-time paid weeks of training (even for part-

time positions) Ability to work days, nights, weekends, holidays and varied schedules

This position is essential to keeping our operation running smoothly and maintaining customer loyalty to our partners. We have PSAs in more than 20 locations throughout the country, and our employees have the opportunity to relocate to one of these locations if desired. For more information please visit the Customer Service section of our website:www.airwis.com/car_cs.htm




Currently seeking Part-Time and Full-Time PSA’s:

Passenger Service Agents(PSAs) perform rAmP operations, which include:

• Loading/unloading baggage• Cleaning inside of aircraft • Directing aircraft movement.• Working outside in all types of weather conditions.• Initial wage is $9-$75 per hour - annual increases according to union

requirements:

• Valid and unrestricted driver’s license• Minimum of 18 years of age• Must be able to provide proof of eligibility to work in the U.S.• Abilty to lift up to 50 pounds without assistance and up to 100 pounds with assistance, bend, kneel and squat repeatedly• Must be able to fluently speak, read, write and understand English• Basic math skills• Availability to attend 3 full-time paid weeks of training (even for part-time positions)• Ability to work days, nights, weekends, holidays and varied schedules

This position is essential to keeping our operation running smoothly and maintaining customer loyalty to our partners. We have PSAs in more than 20 locations throughout the country, and our employees have the opportunity to relocate to one of these locations if desired. For more information, please visit the Customer Service section of our website:www.airwis.com/car_cs.htm


land use decisions and ensuring the financial support was there to increase traffic at Dulles. After being elected to the Virginia Senate in 1971, Waddell was put on the transportation committee, thereby “enhancing my ability to champion needs at Dulles.”

The Sterling-Chantilly site was not the first choice for the new airport—Burke was. But in the end, the die was cast for Lou-doun and Northern Virginia.

Its distance from Washing-ton, DC, left Dulles isolated at first, with most Northern Virginia travelers wanting to use National. One seasoned international traveler complained, “Who would ever drive 26 miles out there to the middle of nowhere to catch an airplane?”

Growth was slow. “We tried everything. The Loudoun Chamber of Commerce used bumper stickers: “Follow me to Dulles; let’s create a traffic jam,” Waddell recalled. In another ploy, American Airlines flew a Boeing 707 down each morning from New York. For $5, passengers could take a sightsee-ing roundtrip to familiarize themselves with Northern Virginia before flying on further south. “People loved it,” he said.

It was not until control for both Dulles and National airports was transferred to the new Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority in the 1980s that Dulles began to hit its stride. It then could seek access to funding for major improvements that had not been possible before, Waddell said.

Along with former Del. Carrington Williams and other local political and business leaders, Wad-dell established the Washington Dulles Task Force with the goal of providing private sector funding improvements at Dulles until the airports author-ity could organize the issuance of development and construction bonds.

With General Assembly support, financial and staffing support was put in place to allow MWAA and WATF to operate until resources became available. The 1978 federal deregulation of airlines also eventually facilitated a speedier growth of air traffic to Dulles.

Congressional help for Dulles, whose improvements were opposed by Baltimore Friend-ship Airport—another player with a stake to protect—came in the early 1970s from Sen. Bill Spong and Congressman Joe Fisher.

When Waddell became chairman of the Virginia Senate Transportation Committee in the mid-1980s and in the early 1990s landed a seat on the Finance Committee, “I was then in a better position to help Dulles,” he said.

Later that decade, help came from Congress-man Frank Wolf and Sens. John Warner and Chuck Robb. In the 1990s and 2000s, successive Virginia governors from Jerry Baliles to Tim Kaine also supported those efforts.

Getting to Dulles was not easy. At first there was only the access road from Washington, DC. It was not until the 1980s that the Dulles Toll Road was built. Nor was there a Rt. 267. And “there was no Rt. 28 in the original plan,” Waddell said,

noting Herndon was the nearest point of access for Loudouners; it was Harrison who led the Rt. 28 push to establish access from Loudoun.

In 1987 Waddell sponsored the Rt. 28 Trans-portation Tax District Bill, with the support and commitment of the business community, that converted the earlier, congested two-lane country road with at-grade crossings to a modern highway. He also sponsored legislation in 1988 for a private toll road—today’s Dulles Greenway—to provide direct access from Leesburg to the airport.

For his long support and activism on behalf of Dulles International Airport, in 1988 the Com-mittee for Dulles honored Waddell with the Tower of Dulles award.

Waddell has good memories of his time at Dulles. In the early years, with only a few flights, Dulles was “dead during the day.” To add a bit of spice, two of the airline’s agents—former college and high school track stars—used the concourse for a “100-yard dash” contest—cheered on appre-ciatively by passengers.

Another time, he was in the midfield opera-tions area with others one afternoon when they saw a pickup truck and trailer with West Virginia tags approaching across an active runway. The driver asked: “Hey, mister, can you tell us how to get to Chantilly?” Waddell politely gave him direc-tions—not the reaction from the control tower, which was a bit more apoplectic.

He also has a poignant memory. Mary Jane Booth, a much loved 42-year-old American Air-lines employee who was secretary to its general manager at Dulles, died on American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

Today, that “middle of nowhere” has played a direct role in Loudoun’s Rt. 28 being dubbed the Silicon Valley of the East and the county’s status as the nation’s wealthiest county.

Photos courtesy of Washington Airports Task Force

These views show the development that has occurred along Rt. 28 from 1989, bottom, to 2006, top.


The Mobile LoungeIncluded in architect Eero Saarinen’s design for the nation’s first airport designed for

commercial jets was another innovative feature: the mobile lounge. When designing the main terminal, now seen as an icon representing Washington Dulles International Airport, Saarinen thought of the passenger first.

“He wanted to minimize walking distances so that the distance from the curb where your car dropped you off, then past the ticket counters to where you boarded [the mobile lounge] was about [200] feet. You didn’t have to walk very far,” Leo Schefer, longtime president of the Washington Air-ports Task Force, said. The concept also was meant to minimize the taxi time on the ground, as the mobile lounges would take passengers to the airplanes on a ramp in the middle of the airfield.

Built by Chrysler Corp. and the Budd Co. in Michigan, “the lounges were in fact really lounges,” Keith Meurlin, the airport’s manager from 1986 to 2005. “They were built in such a way that the interior was wide open. They had a hostess and a bar. Back then, if you went to a Washington Senators baseball game you wore a coat and a tie. You didn’t have steerage on airplanes.

Riding the lounges was one thing, but driving them was another. “It was gigantic vehicle in those days,” said Joseph C. Giuliani, a native of Winchester who started his career in aviation as an architect with Capital Airlines at Ronald Reagan National Airport. In 1959, he started his own firm, Giuliani Associates Architects, specializing in aviation facilities. At the time, Dulles Airport was under construction and several airlines retained him to finish their facilities in the terminal and operations buildings. “I remember when Dulles first opened, I was talking to one of the drivers and he said it was like sitting on the front porch and driving around in it.”

“It was a neat approach but it did not catch on anywhere else,” Schefer said, adding that the system would not be able to handle the volume of passengers the airport sees today. The mobile lounges for the most part were retired in January 2010, replaced by the underground AeroTrain system, although some are still used today.

Before its retirement, the mobile lounge generated a lot of criticism from passengers. “People would say Dulles is the only airport in the world where you had three chances to miss your plane because there was the mobile lounge, etc.,” Schefer said. He was the man behind an update to the system that was aimed at appeasing frustrated passengers waiting for the lounges to take them to their airplanes.

“United came in and did time and motion studies, and found the ugly truth was that the mobile lounges are more efficient than any other airport that had a transit system,” Meurlin recalled. “So we experimented. The idea came to me at a public outreach meeting where people were complaining about the airport and one guy started complaining and he used the example of the mobile lounges are like ‘sitting in my car waiting for my family to get ready for church.’” That set off a light bulb with Meurlin, who realized “if you’re standing in the kitchen reading the newspaper waiting for the wife and the kids to get ready to go to church it’s not a long wait. If you’re sitting in a car, it’s an eternity. On a mobile lounge, when you get on you expect it to move. And it doesn’t.

“So what we tried doing was bringing the lounge in, letting the people off, closing the door and having the people wait outside, and then open it up, put them in and move. Well, then they could see the lounge out there, and they started banging on the doors.

“So then we tried moving the lounge but there’s not an effective amount of area to maneuver to trick the public to give them the perception of having more control over their destiny.”

The solution came from Schefer: A countdown clock outside each mobile lounge “so that you knew which lounge would go first and people could see how long it would be before it went, and they could relax.”

“It really worked out well because people want to be in control,” Meurlin added. “Even if they show up with 20 minutes to go before a flight, they still believe it’s your fault. The count-down worked tremendously.”

— Therese P. Howe

Courtesy of Joseph Giuliani

Joseph Giuliani parked his new Corvair nexto to a mobile lounge in 1962 to offer perspective on its size.

Congratulations to Dulles on Congratulations to Dulles on Congratulations to Dulles on its 50th anniversary!its 50th anniversary!its 50th anniversary!

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’60s

’70sThe 1970s started auspiciously, when

First Lady Pat Nixon ushered in the era of jumbo jets and christened Pan Am’s

Boeing 747 at Dulles in January 1970. Two years later, Dulles hosted the U.S.

International Transportation Exposition, a nine-day international show designed to show-case the latest transportation technologies. It was promoted as the world’s largest air show featuring the new wide-body planes, high speed trains and the latest automated transit systems.

More aviation firsts were to come, with Concorde supersonic service starting in 1976. On May 24 of that year, a British Airways Concorde from London and an Air France Concorde from Paris flew into Dulles, where they were posed nose-to-nose for photos.

It was the culmination of years of con-troversy over the supersonic transport aircraft over concerns about noise levels. The federal government, which still owned Dulles at the time, ordered an 18-month trial that involved setting up instruments at Sully Plantation to gauge the noise levels and vibrations, said Washington Airports Task Force President Leo Schefer, who was involved in the Concorde program at the time.

“This 18-month trial scientifically showed that all these claims were totally false,” he said, adding that the data indicated that “the vacuum cleaners at Sully Plantation created more vibra-tion than the Concorde did.”

As new aircraft were introduced, capital

improvements continued. The projects in this period included the opening of Air Cargo Building 2 and the Marriott Hotel in 1970 and later in the decade, the expansion of the north side of the jet ramp and first air traffic control tower. In 1978, construction also began on additions to the main terminal.

That year signaled the start of a challeng-ing period for Dulles, as the Airline Deregula-tion Act of 1978 allowed airlines to choose which cities they would service, prompting many to leave Dulles. Where airlines under federal regulations were once required to serve cities directly on direct routes, deregulation spawned the modern “hub-and-spoke” network in which airlines use a central airport from which they provide routes to other cities.

“Now the airlines were allowed to fly where they wanted to domestically based on market demand, there was no regulatory body telling them where to go or what to charge,” Schefer explained. “So the airlines started leav-ing Dulles and going to National Airport. And Dulles dropped from around 4 million passen-gers down to 2 million passengers.”

The airport served between 2 and 3 mil-lion passengers annually through the 1970s, according to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, and it wasn’t until the middle of the following decade that “the true vision of Dulles began to emerge,” according to MWAA’s web site.

— Therese P. Howe

Five years after construction began, Dulles International Airport opened for business in 1962. The terminal cost $108.3 million to

build and measured 600 feet long—representing only half of architect Eero Saarinen’s vision as the original 1,240 feet was deemed too costly at the time.

Construction required excavation of 11.5 mil-lion cubic yards of earth, and when it was all over, the airport had two parallel north-south runways that were each 11,500 feet long and 150 feet wide. A third northwest-southeast runway was shorter at 10,000 feet but just as wide. Also opening at the same time was a 13.5-mile limited access highway known as the Dulles Access Road, which connected the airport to the Capital Beltway and Rt. 123 in McLean.

Acknowledging his predecessor’s role in start-ing the airport, President John F. Kennedy invited President Eisenhower to the Nov. 17official dedica-tion ceremony. The event was attended by thou-sands of spectators, including the family of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s late secretary of state for whom the airport was named.

At the ceremony, Kennedy complimented Eisenhower and Gen. Elwood “Pete” Quesada, a WWII fighter pilot and Eisenhower’s special adviser on aviation, “not merely because they saw the necessity of Washington having a jet airport, and not merely because they determined on a most appropriate name, but also because they chose a design and an architect, and builders, which made this a distinguished ornament of a great country and a great governmental system,” he said, accord-ing to The American Presidency Project.

“Most of all, I want to commend those who’ll be working here, those who fly our planes, those who man those planes, those members of the Immigration Service who will be the first Ameri-cans that visitors will see here in the United States. And I hope it will be possible, building on what has been done here at Dulles Airport, that we will make sure that all of our airports and all of our piers at the seas, and all of the people who work on them, show a face of America to the world which is our best face,” Kennedy said.

Two days after that ceremony, the first com-mercial flight arrived when Eastern Airlines brought in passengers from Newark International Airport in New Jersey. Other airlines that served Dulles that year were American, Braniff, Delta, TWA and Northwest Orient. Built to accommodate 6 million passengers a year, the airport served 52,846 passen-gers in its inaugural year. Steady growth occurred and four years later, it was handling more than 1 million passengers.

The airport did not only attract travelers, however. “This was a huge dating location,” said former Dulles Airport Manager Keith Meurlin, who grew up in an Air Force family traveling the world and ended up in Falls Church. “When I first came here at the base of the tower, there was a really first-class, white linen tablecloth, sterling silver res-taurant, The Portals. And you’d see kids from the area come here for prom—there was no place else to go. They’d come out here with their dates and you’d see them in their tuxes and their gowns, and they’d be in there having dinner. It was really pretty fancy. It was a destination.”

— Therese P. Howe

The second decade of Dulles Airport was marked by the arrival of new wide-body aircraft and super-sonic transports such as the British Airways and Air France Concordes, above.

Courtesy of the Washington Airports Task Force

This photo courtesy of the Washington Airports Task ForcePhotos below, courtesy of the Rust Archive, Thomas Balch Library, Leesburg


A Capital Development Program in the 1990s included the addition of several new cargo build-ings, including the one above, to accommodate the double digit growth in cargo. In 1990, 386 million pounds of mail and freight flew into Dulles compared with 792 million pounds in 1999. Today, there are seven cargo buildings on the property with more than 540,000 square feet of operational space.

’80s

’90s’70s

With the departure of many airlines from Dulles because of deregulation, the airport was quite deserted in the late ‘70s into the early 1980s. It was so unused, in fact, that

organizations were allowed to use the facility, according to WATF President Leo Schefer. Two examples he cited were a black-tie dinner on the concourse held by the Fairfax Chamber, which had Rep. Frank Wolf (R-10th District) as the guest of honor, and a fly-in by British Aerospace, now BAE Systems.

While passenger service languished, construction projects in this period include new passenger waiting areas on the upper level of the terminal, the first economy parking lots, more cargo build-ings and temporary midfield concourses C and D. Other milestones beyond the airport in this decade included the completion of the Dulles Access extension to I-66 and construction of the parallel lanes that would become the Dulles Toll Road, marking the start of devel-opment along the Dulles Corridor.

Things would come to a head soon, however, as National Air-port started becoming overly congested. “A chap called Carrington Williams who had retired from the Virginia General Assembly and who had a hand in creating the Virginia Port Authority as a legislator, retired back to his home of Northern Viriginia and found this battle raging over National Airport,” Schefer recalled. “He saw this beauti-ful facility out in the sticks which nobody was using, and he said if National’s the problem, Dulles is the solution. So he set about getting a program in place to get Dulles Airport developed as the solution.” To pull off that program, Williams pulled together civic, elected and business leaders, and together they formed the Washington Airports Task Force in 1982 to market Dulles to the airlines.

Besides marketing to the airlines, the group’s early efforts also focused on encouraging the Smithsonian to expand the National Air and Space Museum to expand to Dulles. The museum was offered the Space Shuttle Enterprise but they had nowhere to put it, accord-ing to Schefer. “Sandy Murdock, acting deputy director of the FAA at the time, said to [then Museum Director] Walter Boyne, ‘Accept, we’ll find somewhere to put it,’” Schefer said, and the Enterprise arrived in June 1983 aboard a modified Boeing 747. “It provided an icon to keep people working to expand the museum but it still took them until 2003 until it was on display,” he added.

Back on the runways, another result of deregulation was the

rise of small startup airlines, such as New York Air and Presidential Airways, which attempted to create hubs at Dulles. It created a highly competitive environment of airfare wars, and “there was a period where if we persuaded Presidential Air-ways to fly a new route, within a couple of days Continental would announce lower fares and triple the number of flights to try and push the airline out. And then United would come about a month later with lower fares and even more service,” Schefer recalled. “We called it the battle for the hub. United won, they drove Continental back to Newark.”

In the end, neither New York Air nor Presidential Airways survived, but their efforts “proved the market was here,” Keith Meurlin said. He became airport manager in 1985, a year after the airport was renamed Washington Dulles International Airport.

That year was a pivotal one, as it was then that Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole formed a commission to divest the airports from the federal government, which was unable to fund necessary improvements at the facilities.

“They’d really been suffering for 20 years from neglect and it became really apparent that parts of Dulles needed to be rebuilt and modernized in order to meet demand,” Schefer said. “So the next task was to get the airports away from the federal government into the hands of an independent regional body which could float loans, issue bonds, fund improvements to the airports and also market them.”

Among the more influential members of Dole’s commission was a new Republican congressman, Frank Wolf, whose district included

Dulles. “He was elected on a platform of doing something about National with Dulles as the solution, and ever since he has been a big helper of the air-port and of Dulles Rail. We would not have as a region been doing what’s been achieved without Frank Wolf, across party lines, doing what was needed,” Schefer said.

The commission completed its work and in October 1986 President Reagan signed legislation that included the Metropolitan Washington Airports

Act. Less than a year later, in June 1987, both National and Dulles were transferred to the newly formed Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority.

— Therese P. Howe

It wasn’t until the 1990s that Dulles began to take off as an international airport. At the beginning of the decade, Dulles served 1.4

million international passengers and by 1999, more than 3.5 million international travelers passed through the gates. Overall, passenger numbers increased 65 percent from 1996 to 1999, when Dulles had almost 20 million travelers.

The growth, however, was not smooth. Instead, “it grows in fits and starts. It’s a series of peaks and valleys,” WATF President Leo Schefer said. “The peaks comes from an airline deciding it wants to be king of Dulles and moving in with a lot of service, high frequency and low fares designed not to make money but to push the other guys out. They nearly succeed in doing it, then they drop things back so you get the valley.” Nevertheless, the result has been very steady growth.

One of the primary drivers behind this growth was the debut of Open Skies agreements, which eased regulations imposed by interna-tional bilateral programs that determined airline service between cities. The bilateral agreements determine “which city pairs could be served, which airlines were allowed to fly, in some instances how frequent the flights could be, how many passengers were carried, even what the

fares could be,” Schefer said. To accommodate all the growth, Dulles

underwent a major Capital Development Pro-gram, according to MWAA’s website. The pro-gram, the website says, included the expansion of the main terminal in 1996 to Eero Saarinen’s original vision of 1,240 feet in length; an International Arrivals Building that provided Federal Customs and Border Protection, Agri-culture and Immigration Service; permanent concourses; cargo buildings to accommodate the double digit growth in that sector; roadways and overpasses; aircraft gates and aprons for additional aircraft parking: more parking lots; and taxiway and runway improvements.

In anticipation of even more growth in the coming years, in 1999 the airport purchased 1,000 acres for future expansion. In May of that year, Dulles hosted the U.S. commemoration of the Berlin Airlift, the yearlong American and British relief effort to air-drop more than 2 mil-lion tons of food and supplies to the blockaded city. Other notable events in the 1990s include the retirement of a reconnaissance aircraft SR-71 Blackbird, which broke four speed records on its flight from California in March 1990 and the first Dulles Plane Pull charity event in 1993.

— Therese P. Howe

Deregulation was followed by the departure of many established airlines from Dulles and the advent of new startup airlines such as People Express Airlines.Below: Then Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole, with Congresman Frank Wolf in the middle, cuts the ribbon at a ceremony transferring Dulles and National from the federal government to a new regional body called the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority.

Photos courtesy of the Washington Airports Task Force

Courtesy of the Washington Airports Task Force


2000 and beyondThe first year of the new millennium saw the airport service 20 million passengers,

almost 4 million of which were international travelers. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, however, passenger travel plunged by 3 million at the lowest point in 2003, but has returned to above the 20 million mark. International travel in particular has seen steady growth, with 6.5 million international passengers going through Dulles last year.

This year, travelers have even more international options with daily service now being offered to Dubai on Emirates Airlines; Mexico City on Aeromexico; Toronto on Porter; and Doha, Manchester, Dublin and San Salvador on United, according to MWAA. Next year, daily nonstop service will begin on Etihad Airways to Abu Dhabi, bringing the total number of weekly Middle Eastern flights to 41—more than the number at John F. Kennedy, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority said in a feature commemorating the airport’s 50th anniversary.

In anticipation of the continued growth, MWAA in 2000 launched a second major capital improvements program called the Dulles Development, or D2, pro-gram. It which included the construction of a new FAA traffic control tower; a fourth runway; renovation of the main terminal; two daily parking garages providing 8500 new spaces; a fourth runway; new security mezzanines; and an AeroTrain System that replaced most of the mobile lounges.

The latter project cost $1.7 billion and was completed in 2009. “We had three different systems of tunneling going on at once, and we had a big tunnel machine for some of it. We had holes all over the airport where we would drop the things down,” Ken Vogel, MWAA’s construction manager from 1989 to 2010, said. “We had a tunnel boring machine under the runway so we didn’t have to disrupt operations.”

Among his favorite memories of his work at Dulles was finally getting the AeroTrain vehicles from overseas. “I think my trip to Japan to accept the first model of the train car was the highlight of my work [at MWAA],” Vogel said. “When we finished the train system it was really just hard work getting the thing to run right, just because those systems are inherently a problem because they’re so complicated. So we had to try three times to get that thing going. Finally on the third try we met the reliability standards.”

In other preparations for future growth, MWAA purchased 830 more acres in 2005 and then three years later, accepted control of the Dulles Toll Road from the Virginia Department of Transportation in the first step to build a 23-mile extension of the Metrorail to include a stop at Dulles.

Looking to the future, airport officials have been focusing on growing its cargo industry, and with more than 400 acres of land available for development, Dulles is in a unique position among airports on the East Coast to do so. Although the question of necessary road improvements around the airport has not been answered, “I think we will see cargo grow,” Washington Airports Task Force President Leo Schefer said.

“And if we find ways to make cargo grow here, then we will have created a key ingredient to attract … very high-tech manufacturing, which can bring back manufac-turing to this country,” he said, adding that the subsequent growth will be found not just in Loudoun, Prince William and Fairfax but in areas three hours away. “Whether

that three hour drive will get you to Prince William or to Charlot-tesville will be a func-tion the surface trans-portation system.”

Beyond the airport borders but still on its property, another major project is in the works: a 23-mile Metrorail exten-sion into Loudoun County, with a stop

at the airport. The first phase of the project, which is expected to cost $2.9 billion, extends the Orange Line from East Falls Church to Wiehle Avenue in Reston. Phase 2 will create six more stations from Reston Town Center through Herndon and Dulles Airport, then on to Rt. 606 and Rt. 772 in Ashburn.

— Therese P. Howe

Leesburg Today Archive

Courtesy of MWAA

Truss erecting cement spans near I-495 as part of the Dulles Metrorail project

Space Shuttle Discovery piggybacks to Dulles in April 2012

This photo and above left: Tunneling takes place throughout airport property for the AeroTrain System as part of the D2 Program.

Dulles is one of the few airports in the country that has daily service on the Airbus A380, , according to MWAA.

Four photos at right courtesy of

Washington Airports

Task Force

In 1962 when Dulles first opened, planes parallel-parked nose to tip and mobile lounges were used to ferry passengers from the main terminal to the planes. Today, planes park perpendicular to the gates at midfield concourses.


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Anniversary Gala Celebration at DullesOn Nov. 16, the airport’s main terminal was transformed into a

banquet room and dance hall, where more than 500 members of the Committee for Dulles, Washington Airports Task Force,

Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and their guests celebrated the airport’s 50th anniversary.

Mary WatersA beloved icon in the local aviation community for her work

with the Committee for Dulles, writer and publicist Mary Waters hadn’t flown in an airplane many times before she got involved with the organization promoting the new airport back in the mid ‘60s.

That changed with a phone call from a local businessman who owned Arrowhead Farm, a cattle ranch on the edge of the airport, and who ended up being one of the founders of the committee. “Hal Launders called me one day and said, ‘I’m going to put together a meeting and I need you to help me send out invitations, announcements, et cetera et cetera, and it’s going to be about this new airport we’re going to have out here.’ … So I re-member putting together the invitations and the announcements, and I went to the first one and I’ve been going ever since.”

She became a networking powerhouse for the group, bring-ing in business executives from a variety of industries and mentor-ing other professional women who have gone on to lead successful businesses, such as Reston Limousine CEO Kristina Bouweiri and Bridgman Communications owner Georgia Graves.

Now 82, Waters lives at Inova’s nursing facility on its Cornwall campus in Leesburg. She attended the 50th Anniversary gala celebration, where dozens of well-wishers came up to her to share memories and extend invitations to return to her old haunts. “One guy came up to me and he said,’Oh I’m so and so from the Hyatt and I was told to come and say hi and tell you to come back to the Hyatt.’ I used to give them a lot of business because we mostly had our meetings in the hotels. Everybody seemed to be having a rip-roaring good time,” she said.

— Therese P. Howe Howard Lansat and Mary Waters

Photography this page and opposite by Howard Lansat Photography


And The Band Played On Of the guests at the Washington Dulles International Airport’s anniversary gala celebration Nov. 16, at least four had been at the opening ceremony 50 years ago. And just as they did five decades ago, they joined eight of their former colleagues in the U.S. Air Force Pipe Band in per-forming for an audience at the airport. Back in 1962, they and their band members had just formed as an independent unit of the U.S. Air Force Band after debuting in 1950 as part of the Air Force Drum & Bugle Corps. “Not all of them were at Dulles that day but they all performed with President Kennedy” at various events, Georgia Graves of Bridgman Communications said. Graves is on the Committee for Dulles Board of Directors and organized the band’s return to Dulles for the celebration. “This was an incredible opportunity for them to come together and many of them hadn’t seen each other since we [cel-ebrated the airport’s 40th anniversary] 10 years ago,” Graves said. The band was stationed at Bolling Air Force Base and played at hundreds of events around the world before being disbanded in 1970 because of budget cuts. “I think what was amazing to the general public was the quality in their performance, the high execution and just the incredible talent. Most of them are teach-ers and they’re still playing,” she said. Among the 12 performers playing at the event were band leaders Pipe Major Sandy Jones and Lead Drummer John Bosworth. In addition to their performance at the gala, the band played the next day for the general public at the airport on its official opening date, Nov. 17. After the performance, the group was treated to wine at Fabbioli Celllars and then dinner at the Rail Stop Restaurant in the Plains, owned by Tommy Kee, former chef for Robert Duvall. During their stay, the band also visited Bolling Air Force Base, where they had been stationed decades ago. “Some of them hadn’t been back in over 35 years,” Graves said. “There was a military officer standing by this large glass case and he pointed out to these gentlemen as they were looking into it, ‘This is the drum that was played at John F. Kennedy’s funeral.’ And I said, ‘Sir, this is the man who played it and he donated it.’” Graves noted that the band’s presence and performance would not have occurred had it not been for the generosity of several sponsors. “We are extremely grateful to Kristina Bouweiri, CEO of Reston Limousine, and Kurt Krause, general manager of the National Conference Center. Kristina provided full transportation from the moment the band arrived on Nov. 13 through all the practices and performances till they departed on Sunday Nov. 18. Kurt accommodated the members and support staff with rooms and meals throughout their stay.” Other supporters included United Airlines, air transportation sponsor; Unanet, historic sponsor; Howard Lansat Photography; and Northrop Grumman, uniform sponsor.

— Therese P. Howe

This photo and photo below are courtesy of the U.S. Air Force Pipe Band

Howard Lansat Photography


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the golden years: dulles airport's 50th anniversary

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