Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD) opened on November 17, 1962, dedicated by President John F. Kennedy with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower in attendance. It was the first U.S. airport designed specifically to handle commercial jet aircraft, a distinction that shaped everything from its runway geometry to its terminal architecture. The $110 million federal project was built on a 10,000-acre site in Loudoun and Fairfax Counties, Virginia, roughly 26 miles west of downtown Washington.

The terminal was designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, who died in 1961, a year before the airport opened. His design features a suspended concrete roof, a catenary curve requiring no interior columns, flanked by angled exterior pillars that suggest the abstract form of flight. To spare passengers long walks across an expansive apron, Saarinen introduced mobile lounges, motorized vehicles that drove directly to parked aircraft. The terminal was later expanded in 1996 by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, more than doubling its original 600-foot length to 1,240 feet. United Airlines established a hub at IAD in 1986 and now dominates Concourses C and D, operating the bulk of the airport's transatlantic and transcontinental schedule.

IAD handles more international passenger traffic than any other airport in the Mid-Atlantic outside the New York metro area, accounting for approximately 90% of international traffic in the Baltimore-Washington region. In 2025, the airport set an all-time passenger record of just over 29 million. The airport sits at the center of one of the most diplomatically significant markets in the world, and that reality shows in its route map: flag carriers from across Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia maintain regular nonstop service, giving IAD one of the broadest carrier-to-destination ratios of any U.S. international gateway.