Content area
Full text
WHEN IT OPENED IN NOVEMBER 1962, Washington's Dulles International Airport was on the leading edge of airport design and theory, the first built specifically to handle jet aircraft and the first with separate buildings to handle people and airplanes. passengers were processed in the main terminal, then walked to vehicles (called mobile lounges) that served as both hold rooms and transporters to airliners parked at a long service building parallel to the terminal.
Unfortunately for the visionaries, the future did not develop as expected. Airplanes and traffic outgrew this system and so, following architect Eero Saarinen's original plan, the landside terminal was doubled in size. Temporary concourses not envisioned by the Finnish designer were added to the airfield. The mobile lounges, which had seemed so trendy in the 1960s, were pressed into service as commuter vans between the terminal and the newer interim concourses, forcing travelers to budget additional time. During peak periods they often are filled to standing-room capacity. Meanwhile, the requirement for security checkpoints ate terminal space and forced passengers into long, slow, switchback lines that 9/11 measures greatly exacerbated.
Now the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which has operated Dulles and Reagan Washington National Airport since 1987, is replacing these makeshift arrangements with modern facilities, following a new master plan dubbed D2 (Dulles Development) that is scaled to handle traffic well into this century. It will address many but not all of the challenges facing IAD.
Building new facilities while old ones continue operating is never easy on users. passengers and staff endure malfunctioning air conditioning, long walks to gates in the midfield concourse when underground moving walkways are out of service, delayed baggage delivery when ground vehicles maneuver around airfield construction sites and other facts of life in a construction zone.
But when the $3.4 billion program, which started in 2000, is finished in two years, Dulles will have an automated underground train system linking the landside terminal to the existing A/B Concourses between the runways. Additionally, a new security plaza in the main terminal will nearly double the number of checkpoints, and travelers will find more shops and food and beverage choices. Two parking garages already have been completed, as has a control tower expected to become operational this summer. A...