(CNN) — “It’s not a good airport at all,” President Donald Trump said of Dulles International Airport outside Washington DC, at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday. “It’s a terrible airport.”
He’s not alone in his assessment.
Operational for 60 years, Dulles regularly makes it on worst airport lists, largely due to one of its most unusual features: the people movers, more formally known as “mobile lounges,” used to ferry passengers between gates and planes.
These cumbersome vehicles — a sort of giant bus elevated on hydraulics — became a talking point for the President’s cabinet meeting after a crash last month injured more than a dozen people. And now Trump is vowing big changes.
Mobile lounges are not the only problem. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy later called out the airport for its “jet fuel smell.” He’s announced that his department is inviting proposals and public-private partnership plans to construct new terminals and concourses there.
It may have few modern fans, but the story of Dulles’ design and evolution is an interesting one, explains Bob van der Linden, commercial aviation curator for the National Air and Space Museum.
“It’s the primary portal to the nation’s capital, especially overseas travelers,” van der Linden said. “It’s extremely important. And of course, those big runways are wonderful for big airplanes.”
The first American airport built for jets
Dulles was built because during World War II, it became clear that Washington National Airport wasn’t able to accommodate the area’s growth in air traffic. The Washington Airport Act of 1950 paved the way for work to begin, once a location had been chosen.
“They were thinking about an area in Burke, Virginia, or taking over an Air Force base — that didn’t work,” van der Linden said. “They settled on Chantilly, Virginia, which was quiet, open farmland.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower selected the vast 10,000-acre site in 1958. Then the name was chosen — in honor of John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State in Eisenhower’s administration.
It was built for the future. The airport was the first in the country designed to handle the commercial jets that were starting to dominate the air. Massive runways were built in anticipation of faster, bigger aircraft as the supersonic age beckoned.
Despite this, the new airport gained a reputation as a “white elephant,” said van der Linden. Many claimed it a waste of taxpayer money because, since it was 26 miles outside Washington, DC, it was thought no one would use it.
But success eventually came. Thanks, according to an analysis from George Mason University, to three factors.
First, Fairfax County, Virginia, right on the airport’s doorstep, experienced significant commercial and residential growth over the years and Dulles proved to be a convenient transport option for its expanding population.
Second, airline deregulation in 1978 allowed airlines to set up “hub and spoke” route networks, connecting large air hubs like Dulles to smaller cities and drastically increasing air traffic.
Finally, airport expansion in 1999 saw the opening of a new midfield concourse terminal that increased capacity.
For all its perceived faults, Dulles has won plaudits for its aesthetics. Eero Sarrinen, the architect who designed the sweeping, contemporary lines of its original terminal said he wanted to “find the soul” of the airport, according to the Dulles website. He referred to it as “the best thing I have done.”
Sarrinen was praised by Trump earlier this week as “one of the greatest architects in the world,” calling his efforts at Dulles “a great building at a bad airport,” while teasing an “amazing plan” for the airport’s reimagining.
The infamous people movers
For many, Dulles’ main flaw, said van der Linden, is what made it original in the first place: it’s reliance on the people-moving mobile lounges. Created by a partnership of Chrysler and train makers Budd Company, they could accommodate about 100 people. Today they’re still in operation for international arrivals and Air Force flights.
“The problem was, among many, was the airport was great when it opened in 1962 and fine throughout the ‘60s, and then after deregulation, the traffic increased,” he said. “Those mobile lounges just weren’t quite that useful anymore, and we needed ways to deal with it with increased traffic.”
Will it change?
Over the last 40 years, there’s been a major push by aviation officials to modernize Dulles, van der Linden said. But until now, little progress has been made.
That could soon change if Trump delivers on this week’s promise to “make it into as good as there is in the country.”
“It’ll be exciting,” he added.
Dulles sudden elevation on Trump’s to-do list comes after last month’s incident when a mobile lounge crashed into a concourse, injuring 18 people. Other incidents have happened in the past, including one involving a Southwest Airlines ramp agent who was killed in 2012, according to The Washington Post.
It’s unclear what Trump or the Department of Transportation wants to change about the “terrible” airport. In early October, Trump made an unplanned stop to Dulles, which the White House said was for the president to assess “potential future projects.”
The DOT submitted a request this week for information in approaching the design, financing and construction of a new terminal.
United Airlines, which uses Dulles as one of its hubs, released a statement in the wake of this week’s comments from the administration. “We look forward to working with President Trump, Secretary Duffy, and FAA Administrator Bedford to continue to enhance the airport’s infrastructure and operations in a meaningful and cost-effective way for the benefit of our customers and employees.”
Adding new facilities shouldn’t be technically challenging, according to van der Linden.
“Dulles was built with an eye in the future back in 1962,” he said. It was built “so it could be expanded, because the land out there, there’s lots of it, and you can add runways to it, which is a problem most airports have these days. They need more runways.”
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
