Dulles International c1974_01

by Greg Reed

Title

Dulles International c1974_01

Artist

Greg Reed

Medium

Photograph - Photo

Description

c. 1974
Taken with a Nikkormat FTN w/Vivitar 28mm f 2.8 Prime on Ektachrome 64. Film was hand processed and mounted in my darkroom.

Almost 50 year old slide scanned and color corrected as best as possible using a 17 year old Microtek scanner and PS CC!!


Dulles International

Washington Dulles International Airport (/'d?l?s/ DUL-iss) (IATA: IAD, ICAO: KIAD, FAA LID: IAD) is an international airport in the eastern United States, located in Loudoun and Fairfax counties in Virginia, 26 miles (42 km) west of downtown Washington, D.C.[3]

Opened in 1962, it is named after John Foster Dulles (1888–1959),[4][5] the 52nd Secretary of State who served under President 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 13,000 acres (20.3 sq mi; 52.6 km2)[1] straddling the Loudoun-Fairfax line.[6] 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. The airport serves the Washington metropolitan area.

Dulles is one of the three major airports in the larger Baltimore–Washington metropolitan area with more than 21 million passengers a year.[7][8] 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.[9] On a typical day, more than 60,000 passengers pass through Dulles to and from more than 125 destinations around the world.[7][10] Dulles Airport has recently surpassed Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in monthly passenger boardings and is on pace to exceed Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport's annual passenger numbers for 2018 after having fewer passengers ever since 2015.[11] However, Dulles Airport still ranks behind Baltimore–Washington International Airport (BWI) in total annual passenger boardings, despite being a larger facility with more gates.

History

Origins

Prior to World War II, Hoover Field was the main commercial airport serving Washington, on the site now occupied by The Pentagon and its parking lots. It was replaced by Washington National Airport in 1941, a short distance southeast. After the war, in 1948, the Civil Aeronautics Administration began to consider sites for a second major airport to serve the nation's capital.[12] Congress passed the Washington Airport Act in 1950 to provide funding for a new airport in the region.[13] The initial CAA proposal in 1951 called for the airport to be built in Fairfax County near what is now Burke Lake Park, but protests from residents, as well as the rapid expansion of Washington's suburbs during the time, led to reconsideration of this plan.[14] One competing plan called for the airport to be built in the Pender area of Fairfax County, while another called for the conversion of Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George's County, Maryland into an airport.[12]

The current site was selected by President Eisenhower in 1958;[14] the Dulles name was chosen by Eisenhower's aviation advisor Pete Quesada, who later served as the first head of the Federal Aviation Administration. As a result of the site selection, the unincorporated, largely African-American community of Willard, which once stood in the airport's current footprint, was demolished, and 87 property owners had their holdings condemned.[12]

Dulles was also built over a lesser known airport named Blue Ridge Airport, chartered in 1938 by the U.S.. The airport was Loudoun County's first official airport consisting of two grass intersecting runways in the shape of an "X". The location of the former Blue Ridge Airport sits where the Dulles Air Freight complex and Washington Dulles Airport Marriott now sit today.[15][better source needed]
Design and original construction
Dulles Airport in 1970

The civil engineering firm Ammann and Whitney was named lead contractor. The airport was dedicated by President John F. Kennedy and Eisenhower on November 17, 1962.[4][5] As originally opened, the airport had three runways (current day runways 1C/19C, 1R/19L, and 12/30). Its original name, Dulles International Airport, was changed in 1984 to Washington Dulles International Airport.[16]

The main terminal was designed in 1958 by famed Finnish-American 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 Taoyuan, 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 Metro's Silver Line and is expected to be completed in 2020.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Dulles_International_Airport

Uploaded

December 4th, 2012

Colors

Embed

Share

Tags