
Washington Dulles International Airport ( DUL-iss; IATA: IAD, ICAO: KIAD, FAA LID: IAD) is the primary international airport serving Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. It is located 26 miles (42 km) west of downtown Washington, D.C., in Loudoun and Fairfax counties in Northern Virginia. Opened in 1962, the airport is named after John Foster Dulles, an influential secretary of state during the Cold War who briefly represented New York in the United States Senate. Operated by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, Dulles occupies 13,000 acres (20.3 sq mi; 52.6 km2); IAD ranks third in the United States in terms of land area, after Denver International Airport and Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. The "striking" and "iconic" Eero Saarinen-designed Main Terminal received vast acclaim for its innovative architecture when it was completed and has gone on to win numerous awards. As of 2024, it is the 24th-busiest airport in the United States, with 27.3 million enplanements. It had more than 20 million passenger enplanements every year from 2004 to 2019. An average of 60,000 passengers pass through Dulles daily to and from more than 139 destinations around the world. 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.

38.944°N, 77.456°O · 95 m s. n. m. (312 ft)
Lengths and surfaces from the public OurAirports register; open runways only.
Tower
Ground
Clearance delivery
ATIS (automatic information)
Approach
Departure
UNICOM
Apron
Frequencies from the official publication: FAA NASR, AIRAC 01 OCT 2026, checked on Oct 16, 2026. They change with each amendment: not for navigation without checking the current AIP. See the official publication In MHz.
Before 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. Congress passed the Washington Airport Act in 1950 to provide funding for a new airport in the region. 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. 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 a commercial airport. The current site was selected by President Eisenhower in 1958; 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. 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. As originally opened, the airport had three long runways (current day runways 1C/19C, 1R/19L, and 12/30) and one shorter one (where current taxiway Q is located). Its original name, Dulles International Airport, was changed in 1984 to Washington Dulles International Airport. 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. The terminal was built without any concourses and gates as all aircraft were parked at remote sites. Passengers were bussed to their aircraft by way of mobile lounges that raised up to the aircraft level; some are still in use today. The first midfield terminal that included gates and jetbridges was constructed in 1985 when New York Air and other airlines began hub operations at Dulles. 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; the highway system eventually 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 opened as an extension of the Washington Metro's Silver Line on November 15, 2022. By 1985 the original design, featuring mobile lounges to meet each plane, was no longer well-suited to Dulles's role as a hub airport. Instead, midfield concourses were constructed to allow passengers to walk between connecting flights without visiting the main terminal. Mobile lounges were still used for international flights and to transport passengers between the midfield concourses and the main terminal; Concourse C/D was the first to be built, followed by Concourse A/B.
From our own logbook: 2,872 aircraft documented between 2006 and 2025.
Types seen here
Boeing 737524
Bombardier CRJ310
Boeing 737 MAX272
Airbus A320246
Embraer ERJ 135 / 145189
Embraer E170 / E175171
Airbus A319167
McDonnell Douglas MD-80123
Boeing 757118
Boeing 77796Airlines with documented aircraft
Busiest routes from here
A count of our own aircraft profiles, year by year, from the public United States flight records: it reflects what we have documented, not the airport’s total traffic.
Other airlines with direct routes
List taken from the airport’s own website (September 2026).
Photo: Burkhard Mücke · CC BY-SA 4.0 · view original
Data from OurAirports (public domain) · destinations and airlines from Wikipedia route tables (CC BY-SA, 2026), unless another source is given · profile and photo from Wikidata/Wikimedia Commons (CC0 / CC) · summary and history from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).
To cite this page in academic work, an article or Wikipedia, choose the style and copy the reference. The access date is today.
This page was last updated on October 16, 2026
APA
Vuelopedia. (2026, October 16). Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD). Retrieved October 17, 2026, from https://vuelopedia.org/en/airport/IAD
MLA
“Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD).” Vuelopedia, Fundación Poderia, 16 Oct. 2026, vuelopedia.org/en/airport/IAD. Accessed 17 Oct. 2026.
Chicago
Vuelopedia. “Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD).” Fundación Poderia. Last modified October 16, 2026. https://vuelopedia.org/en/airport/IAD.
Harvard
Vuelopedia (2026) Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD). Available at: https://vuelopedia.org/en/airport/IAD (Accessed: 17 October 2026).
BibTeX
@misc{vuelopedia_en_airport_iad,
author = {{Vuelopedia}},
title = {{Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD)}},
publisher = {Fundación Poderia},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-10-16},
url = {https://vuelopedia.org/en/airport/IAD},
howpublished = {\url{https://vuelopedia.org/en/airport/IAD}},
urldate = {2026-10-17},
note = {Accessed 2026-10-17}
}Wikipedia
{{cite web |url=https://vuelopedia.org/en/airport/IAD |title=Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD) |website=Vuelopedia |publisher=Fundación Poderia |date=2026-10-16 |access-date=2026-10-17 |language=en}}