Every time you make the drive out to Dulles, somewhere around the 15th mile of the Dulles Toll Road, the same thought hits you: where the hell is this airport?
It’s not an accident that it feels that far. And it wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.
It Was Almost in Burke
After World War II, air travel exploded. National Airport couldn’t keep up. Congress passed the Washington Airport Act of 1950 and started acquiring land for a second regional airport — not out in the Virginia countryside, but in Burke, less than 20 miles from downtown DC.
Then the neighbors got organized.
Burke residents pushed back hard, and they weren’t wrong: the DC suburbs were expanding at a rate nobody had planned for. A major airport on that site would have been swallowed by development before the concrete dried. The whole project stalled.
The Federal Aviation Agency surveyed alternatives: Andrews Air Force Base, Baltimore’s Friendship International (now BWI), and a handful of other sites. None of them worked.
In 1958, President Eisenhower made the call himself. No public hearings. No community input. Condemnation letters went out to every landowner in the Willard area of western Fairfax County — nearly 10,000 acres, at $500 per acre. The residents couldn’t organize fast enough to stop it.
Four years later, they had an international airport.
What Was There Before
The land Dulles sits on wasn’t empty. It was home to a small rural community called Willard — named, incidentally, for the same family behind the famous Willard Hotel a few blocks from the White House.
Willard had a one-room schoolhouse that educated local Black children until schools integrated in the late 1940s. It had Shiloh Primitive Baptist Church, the heart of the area’s African American community, led for more than 50 years by Elder James Bailey starting in 1901. It had more than 300 homes and buildings.
The federal government bought it all out, relocated the church and the school, and handed the families $500 an acre. Longtime resident Charles Waddell remembered his brother’s rural mail route passing right through what later became the runways.
That’s what’s under the terminal.
Why Dulles?
John Foster Dulles served as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959. Along with his brother Allen — who ran the CIA — John Dulles was one of the defining architects of American Cold War foreign policy. He resigned in April 1959 due to cancer. He died on May 24th of that year.
Naming the new international airport after him was Eisenhower’s tribute to the man who had spent six years trying to open America to the world. The symbolism was deliberate: a gateway to global diplomacy, named for the diplomat.
Dulles never saw the airport that bears his name.
Eero Saarinen’s Terminal
Once the site was chosen, somebody had to design the thing.
The commission went to Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American architect who would also design the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. For Dulles, he came up with something that looked like nothing else in American aviation: a swooping concrete roof meant to evoke the wings of a plane in flight, suspended between two rows of inclined columns. It was spectacular, and it still is.
Saarinen also invented the mobile lounge system — the boxy passenger shuttles that drive from the terminal directly to the plane. At the time, it was a genuine innovation. The logic made sense in 1960: keep the terminal elegant, keep the tarmac operations separate.
Construction ran from 1959 to 1962 and cost $110 million.
Opening Day: November 17, 1962
John F. Kennedy dedicated the airport on November 17th, 1962. The ceremony was on the tarmac, all mid-century optimism and jet-age ambition.
Delta Airlines operated the first commercial jet service, flying to Atlanta. Under a million passengers flew through Dulles in its inaugural year.
Fifty years later, the airport handles tens of millions annually. But in 1962, it was a very expensive, very beautiful building in a cornfield.
Three Deaths in Nine Days: Transpo ’72
A decade after opening, Dulles threw a party for itself.
Transpo ’72 was a nine-day transportation exposition celebrating the airport’s 10th anniversary. The Department of Transportation sponsored it. Over one million visitors attended from around the world. The Wall Street Journal called it “the biggest show the government has put on since World War II.”
It turned into a disaster.
On May 29th, 1972 — the third day of the event — the pilot of a Kite Rider hang glider was killed in a crash. On June 3rd, during an afternoon sport plane pylon race, the propeller of a trailing aircraft clipped the right wing of the leading plane and tore it from the fuselage. The plane dropped. The pilot, Hugh Alexander, 29, of Louisville, Georgia, was killed.
On June 4th, the final day, the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds were performing when Joe Howard’s F-4 Phantom II lost power during a vertical maneuver. Howard ejected safely — but the wind carried his parachute directly over the burning wreckage of his jet. The intense heat melted the chute. He fell the final 200 feet. He didn’t survive.
It was the first fatal accident in the Thunderbirds’ history. Howard left behind his wife and a one-day-old son.
Three people dead in nine days. That was the 10th anniversary celebration.
The Concorde Comes to Dulles: May 24, 1976
Nearly 47 years after Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo transatlantic flight, two supersonic jets crossed the Atlantic simultaneously heading west at twice the speed of sound — one from Paris, one from London — and both landed at Dulles within three minutes of each other.
May 24th, 1976. Seventeen years to the day after John Foster Dulles died.
Getting Concorde into the United States at all was a fight. Secretary of Transportation William E. Coleman Jr. approved a 16-month trial: four daily flights each into Kennedy International and Dulles, with conditions. Flights could only operate between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. They had to stay subsonic over U.S. land. And Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle had to be the departure airports — so London and Paris residents faced the same noise as Americans.
Dulles went first because New York’s governors wouldn’t allow the flights into JFK. Congressional opposition was fierce. The Washington Post reported on February 5th, 1976:
At the same time, a move is being made this morning in the Senate Commerce Committee to attach to an airport financing bill an amendment to ban Concorde flights permanently into the United States. The House last year prohibited the flights from Kennedy.
A bill was introduced by Senator Dale Bumpers (D., Ark.) to deny all federal aid to any airport that allows the Concorde to land on a regular commercial basis.
Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin led the Senate fight. Coleman responded publicly:
“… Concorde will fail because it is an anachronism, and its failure will be recognized as such rather than attributed to an arbitrary and protectionist attitude of the United States out of fear that our dominance of the world aeronautical manufacturing market is threatened.”
He was right, eventually. But first he had to deal with Fairfax County.
The day before the scheduled landing, Fairfax County officials went to Chief Justice Warren Burger at the Supreme Court requesting a stay on Coleman’s order. Burger said no.
Nearly 8,000 people showed up at Dulles to watch. Souvenirs were sold. France’s minister of transportation, Marcel Caville, stepped off and declared:
“On this date — May 24, 1976 — the distance separating the European continent and North America has in a single step been cut in half.”
There was a minor scare on the British Airways approach: a small single-engine aircraft came within 400 feet of the inbound Concorde. In aviation terms, that’s terrifyingly close.
The next morning, both jets prepared to depart. FAA noise monitors lined the runway for Air France’s departure. The takeoff registered two and a half times louder than conventional jets.
British Airways pilot Norman Todd chose a different runway to avoid flying over neighborhoods. When the tower asked why:
“It is preferable for the community noise reasons… We are therefore doing it, not in order to avoid observation or anything else. We are doing it because that is the best thing to do.”
One nearby resident, Mrs. Puterbaugh, called the Washington Post afterward:
“I thought it was horrible… My daughter’s show horse jumped over a 5-foot fence. She ran around it twice and jumped over… [The pilot] must have gunned it when he got over my house… It was terrifying.”
She had to go looking for her horses and goats afterward. Some of the goats hid under the truck.
The youngest passenger on the first Air France departure was Hazel Hoff, 8 years old, flying with her parents and 9-year-old brother Paul Hoff III. Their father, Paul Hoff Jr., was a cattle rancher from Wyoming who had written to Air France in 1972 asking for reservations. The tickets cost him $4,100.
Paul III, a third-grader, offered his pre-flight assessment: “It’s going to be a lot of fun and I expect it to be very fast.”
Indeed.
Fairfax County sued the FAA in June, claiming the flights violated the 1972 Federal Noise Control Act. The flights continued anyway. Air France pulled the Dulles route in 1982. British Airways stopped Washington service in 1994.
A round-trip Concorde ticket to Paris in 2000 would have run you $8,150. Mrs. Puterbaugh probably came out fine.
The Unabomber’s First Federal Crime
On November 15th, 1979, American Airlines Flight 444 was inbound to Dulles from Chicago when a package in a mailbag ignited and filled the cabin with smoke. The Boeing 727 made an emergency landing at Dulles. Twelve passengers were treated for smoke inhalation.
Investigators found that the bomb had failed to fully detonate due to a faulty timing mechanism. Had it worked, the plane would have been destroyed.
Because the attempted bombing of an airliner is a federal offense, the FBI got involved. Agents started connecting dots across multiple bombings and gave the case the codename UNABOM — short for “UNiversity and Airline BOMber.” The media shortened it to Unabomber.
Ted Kaczynski stayed hidden in the Montana wilderness for another 16 years before his arrest in 1996. The Dulles emergency landing is what made it a federal investigation.
What Dulles Is Now
Dulles didn’t start as a powerhouse. It spent its first decade as an underused monument to optimism, opening onto farmland with no rail connection and a toll road that felt like driving to another state.
The Saarinen terminal is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Silver Line finally reached Dulles on November 15th, 2022, connecting it to the DC Metro for the first time in its 60-year history.
Not bad for a cornfield in Chantilly that almost ended up in Burke.
We’ve written about what National Airport looked like in 1941, and there’s a full account of the 1962 dedication ceremony at Dulles. Dulles also helped bring Reston into existence.