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Dulles International Airport

1962 establishments in VirginiaAirports established in 1962Airports in VirginiaBuildings and structures in Loudoun County, VirginiaConcrete shell structures
Dulles International AirportEero Saarinen structuresGoogie architectureMetropolitan Washington Airports AuthorityModernist architecture in VirginiaPages with non-numeric formatnum argumentsSkidmore, Owings & Merrill buildingsSuspended structuresTransportation in Fairfax County, VirginiaTransportation in Loudoun County, VirginiaUse mdy dates from June 2013Vague or ambiguous time from February 2020Washington metropolitan area
Washington Dulles International Airport at Dusk
Washington Dulles International Airport at Dusk

Washington Dulles International Airport (IATA: IAD, ICAO: KIAD, FAA LID: IAD), typically referred to as Dulles International Airport, Dulles Airport, Washington Dulles or simply Dulles ( DUL-iss), is an international airport in the Eastern United States, located in Loudoun County and Fairfax County in Virginia, 26 miles (42 km) west of Downtown Washington, D.C. Opened in 1962, it is named after John Foster Dulles (1888–1959), the 52nd U.S. Secretary of State who served under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Dulles main terminal is a well-known landmark designed by Eero Saarinen, who also designed the famous TWA terminal (now the TWA hotel) at New York's JFK airport. Operated by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, Washington Dulles Airport occupies 13,000 acres (20.3 sq mi; 52.6 km2) straddling 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 one of the three major airports in the larger Baltimore–Washington metropolitan area, the others being Reagan National Airport and Baltimore/Washington International Airport, and by land size and amount of facilities is the largest of the three. Dulles is considered the region's international air hub, with dozens of nonstop international flights. Dulles has the most international passenger traffic of any airport in the Mid-Atlantic outside the New York metropolitan area, including approximately 90% of the international passenger traffic in the Baltimore–Washington region. It had more than 20 million passenger enplanements every year from 2004 to 2019, with 24 million enplanements in 2019. On a typical day, more than 60,000 passengers pass through Dulles to and from more than 125 destinations around the world.Increased domestic travel from Reagan National Airport has eroded some of Dulles's domestic routes. Dulles overtook Reagan in total enplanements in 2019. However, in 2018, Dulles Airport surpassed Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in yearly passenger boardings after having fewer passengers since 2015. Furthermore, it still ranks behind Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI) in total annual passenger boardings.Dulles is a hub for United Airlines and is frequently used by airlines which United has codeshare agreements with, mostly composed of Star Alliance members like Turkish Airlines and Lufthansa.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Dulles International Airport (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Dulles International Airport
West Service Road,

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Wikipedia: Dulles International AirportContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 38.944444444444 ° E -77.455833333333 °
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Address

West Service Road

West Service Road
20102
Virginia, United States
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Washington Dulles International Airport at Dusk
Washington Dulles International Airport at Dusk
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Willard, Virginia
Willard, Virginia

Willard (also known as Willard Crossroads) was an unincorporated community located in what is now a part of Washington Dulles International Airport in the U.S. state of Virginia. The village was named after Joseph Edward Willard, a delegate to the Virginia General Assembly from 1893 to 1901, then Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. Although Willard lived in Loudoun County, he represented Fairfax County, because the village was only 1,500 feet (460 meters) from the county border. Willard owned a 50-acre (20-hectare) estate in Fairfax. His father was Joseph Clapp Willard, the owner of the famed Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. Willard was at the intersection of Willard Road (now Stonecroft Boulevard) and Sterling Road (now Horsepen Road), surrounded by extensive farmland, housing, schools, places of worship, the Willard store (until 1907), and Blue Ridge Airfield (1938–1951). Willard stood west of Floris, north of Pleasant Valley, and south of Farmwell (now Ashburn). Willard was regarded as a crossroads and a distinctive community until construction of Washington Dulles International Airport began in 1958. Approximately 26 square miles (67 square kilometers) of Virginia land from Willard, Chantilly, Pleasant Valley, Sterling, and Ashburn was bought for construction. By the airport's completion, all remains of civilization before 1958 on this land had virtually disappeared, except a stretch of Willard Rd (used as a service road), and three storage outbuildings between Runways 1C/19C and 1R/19L.

Enola Gay
Enola Gay

The Enola Gay () is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in warfare. The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused the destruction of about three quarters of the city. Enola Gay participated in the second nuclear attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in Nagasaki, a secondary target, being bombed instead. After the war, the Enola Gay returned to the United States, where it was operated from Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico. In May 1946, it was flown to Kwajalein for the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in the Pacific, but was not chosen to make the test drop at Bikini Atoll. Later that year, it was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution and spent many years parked at air bases exposed to the weather and souvenir hunters, before its 1961 disassembly and storage at a Smithsonian facility in Suitland, Maryland. In the 1980s, veterans groups engaged in a call for the Smithsonian to put the aircraft on display, leading to an acrimonious debate about exhibiting the aircraft without a proper historical context. The cockpit and nose section of the aircraft were exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) on the National Mall, for the bombing's 50th anniversary in 1995, amid controversy. Since 2003, the entire restored B-29 has been on display at NASM's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. The last survivor of its crew, Theodore Van Kirk, died on 28 July 2014 at the age of 93.