George Washington International Airport

George Washington International Airport is the principal airport of the Columbia District and the point at which most of the world arrives in the capital of the United Kingdom of America. It is not in the Columbia District. It stands about twenty-five miles west of New Westminster, in the Province of Virginia, on land the federal government bought in 1960 when it was farms.

It is named for the Realm’s first Governor-General, who signed the Peace of Boston in 1779, took the vice-regal commission in 1783 and was created 1st Duke of Mount Vernon, the first peer of the American realm. The name has never been seriously questioned, which distinguishes it from the capital’s other airport.

Two things about it are widely known outside the Realm. The first is the terminal, a single vast hall under a roof that hangs in a shallow curve between outward-leaning columns, designed by Eero Saarinen and finished after his death. It is on every list of the century’s important buildings, it is protected, and it was extended half a century later to drawings the architect had prepared for the purpose.

The second is that a person can still walk to the gate. In the capital of a Realm that lost more than two thousand people to a coordinated attack on its transport in 2006, families meet arriving passengers where the aircraft doors open, and the concourses are open to anyone who wants to be in them. That is a deliberate national decision and it is the reason this article is longer than an airport usually warrants. What it costs is not visible from the concourse, which is the point of it and also the difficulty.

Siting and construction

The problem of 1958

By the late 1950s the capital had one airport, close to the centre, on a constrained site by the river, with short runways laid out for propeller aircraft. It could not take the jets that were about to enter service, and there was no possibility of lengthening it: the runways ended at water on one side and at the city on the other.

The problem was not principally commercial. The Realm’s capital was on the point of being unable to receive the aircraft other capitals were beginning to send it, at exactly the moment the jet made intercontinental travel a routine instrument of government. A foreign minister flying to New Westminster would have to land somewhere else and drive, which is not a technical inconvenience but a statement about a country’s standing.

The federal government therefore resolved to build an airport for aeroplanes that did not yet serve the capital, at a scale the traffic did not yet justify, and to put it far enough out that it would never face the constraint the existing field had run into.

The land

The site chosen was about twenty-five miles west, in Virginia, and the striking thing about the purchase is its size. The authority bought roughly ten thousand acres, which is several times what the airport required and was never intended to be filled.

The reasoning was that the land around an airport is the airport’s real constraint. Runways are cheap and neighbours are not, and every constrained airfield in the world is constrained by what was built next to it after it opened. So the government bought the neighbours in advance, before there were any.

This is the single best decision anyone has made about aviation in the Realm and it is the reason this airport has been able to grow for sixty years without a public inquiry, while Kennedy and Heathrow have spent the same period unable to add a runway. It is also the reason for what follows.

The village that was removed

A settlement stood on the land. It was called Hallowell, and it had a post office, a church, a school, a mill and a few hundred people, most of them descended from families who had farmed there for generations, and a substantial proportion of them Black.

It was condemned. The residents were paid what the appraisers determined, which was assessed on agricultural value in an area whose value was about to change entirely, and they were required to leave. The buildings were demolished, the church and the burial ground were cleared, the roads were ploughed under, and the name came off the maps. Runway approach lights now stand across part of where it was.

The proceedings were lawful throughout. Compulsory purchase for a public work of national importance is a power the Realm has always held and the airport is unquestionably such a work. Lawful is the whole of what can be said for it. The compensation was inadequate, the alternatives offered were not alternatives, and the community that had existed there did not reconstitute itself anywhere else, because a community is not a set of individual households that can be paid out one at a time.

The airport’s greatest asset is that its site has no constraints. It has no constraints because somebody was removed from it. Those two sentences belong together and the authority has spent sixty years keeping them apart.

HWL

The airport’s code is HWL, and it is the only official trace of Hallowell that survives anywhere.

Codes are assigned to locations rather than to buildings, and the location had a name before it had an airport, which is the ordinary and unremarkable way these things are settled. The three letters went onto the flight plans in 1962 and have been there since. They appear on every ticket, every baggage tag, every timetable and every departure board in the world that lists a service to the capital of the Realm, and they are read several million times a day by people who have no idea what they stand for.

The authority has never drawn attention to this and has never been able to change it, because a code in continuous use for sixty years cannot be altered without disrupting every system that depends on it. The Realm demolished a village, cleared its burial ground, took its name off the maps and then, by an administrative accident nobody intended as a memorial, made that name the most frequently printed word associated with the place.

The descendants’ association has observed that this is not a marker and has declined to accept it as one.

What became of the claim

There is no marker. A proposal to place one has been raised at intervals since the 1990s, has never been refused outright and has never been adopted.

The pattern of the refusals is worth recording because it is not obstinacy. Each application has been met by a body that agrees in principle, identifies a difficulty of siting or jurisdiction, and undertakes to consider it further. The land in question is operational. The authority is not the freeholder of every part of it. The Province of Virginia has a heritage process and the federal government has another and neither is quite the right one. Nobody has ever had to say no.

The descendants’ association that has pursued the matter now numbers more people than the village did, which is a fact its members mention and which cuts both ways: it is evidence of how much was dispersed, and it is the reason the association has outlasted three generations of officials who assumed it would go away.

What is recorded, and is not in dispute, is that the compensation was assessed on agricultural value, that the appraisals were conducted by the acquiring authority, that no residents were offered land elsewhere as a body, and that the church congregation, which was the community’s actual institution, was not treated as a party to anything. Individuals were compensated. A community was not, because the law had no means of recognising that one was being ended.

Building it

Construction ran from 1958, and the airport was dedicated in 1962 by John F. Kennedy, then in his second year as Prime Minister.

The occasion was reported at the time as the opening of an airport and is remembered now for other reasons. Kennedy was assassinated four years later, and the airport at New York that received the Realm’s traffic across the Atlantic was renamed in his memory. The two most recognised airport names in the Realm are therefore its first Governor-General and a murdered Prime Minister, which was nobody’s plan.

The terminal

Saarinen

The building is by Eero Saarinen, a Finnish-born architect working in the Realm, whose father had emigrated a generation earlier and who by 1958 held about as large a reputation as an architect can. He was given a brief nobody had been given before, which was to design a terminal for jet aircraft from first principles rather than by extending a building intended for something else.

He took it as a question about arrival. An airport, he said in terms, is not a shed for sorting people; it is the place a traveller first stands in a country, and it ought to say something about that country before anyone has spoken to them.

He died in 1961, aged fifty-one, of a brain tumour, and never saw the terminal open. It is generally regarded as his best work and he is generally regarded as having thought so.

The hall

What he built is one room.

The roof is a shallow concrete curve suspended between two rows of columns that lean outward, so that it appears to hang rather than to rest, sagging gently in the middle like something slung between posts. There are no internal columns. The airfield side is a wall of glass from the floor to the roofline.

The consequence is that a passenger walking in from the road sees, immediately and without obstruction, the aircraft and the sky. There is almost nothing between the door and the aeroplane: no tunnel, no succession of halls, no sequence of thresholds. The building was designed in 1960 to make arrival feel like arrival.

That this still works is not the architect’s doing. It works because the Realm decided, after 2006, not to fill it with barriers.

Designed to grow

Saarinen drew the extension himself.

He expected the terminal to be too small and specified how it should be enlarged: not outward into piers, which would have ruined it, but lengthwise, by continuing the colonnade and the hanging roof along the same curve until the hall was longer. The drawings were kept.

When the traffic finally arrived, decades later, the authority built what he had specified. The terminal was roughly doubled in length, the new work is indistinguishable from the old to anybody not looking for the joint, and the building is the same building.

This is rare enough to be taught. Every other great airport in these articles has spent fifty years fighting the thing it was added to: Kennedy’s listed roof cannot be altered and cannot accommodate what happens beneath it, and Heathrow is an accretion with no original left to protect. Here the architect anticipated the problem and left instructions, and somebody sixty years later was disciplined enough to follow them.

The mobile lounges

What they are

The terminal has no piers, which means aircraft cannot park against it, which means passengers must be carried out to them. This is done by mobile lounges: enormous slab-sided vehicles raised on hydraulic legs, which dock against the terminal like a room, take on a hundred people, lower themselves, drive across the apron, raise themselves again and dock against the aircraft.

They are unlike anything else in commercial aviation. Riding in one is either a marvel or an ordeal depending on temperament, and the division of opinion has been stable for sixty years.

Why they exist

They were not a compromise. They were the point.

The pier is the reason airport terminals are enormous: aircraft need frontage, frontage means long fingers of building, and long fingers mean a passenger walks half a mile from the door to the gate. Saarinen’s proposition was that if the aircraft could be brought to the passenger instead, the terminal could stay a single compact hall, and the walk from the kerb to the seat could be a few hundred feet.

It was a genuinely good idea and it was defeated by scale. It works beautifully at the traffic levels of 1962 and progressively less well as the number of movements rises, because the lounges are slow, they are a fleet requiring its own maintenance, and every one of them is a vehicle driving about among aircraft.

Why they survive

Most passengers now use midfield concourses reached by an underground train, which is what every large airport does.

The lounges have not gone, and cannot entirely. Some remote stands have no other access, the arrangement is useful for aircraft that arrive at odd hours or need to be kept away from the concourses, and the terminal that would have to be modified to eliminate them is protected. Saarinen designed a building with no piers, so a building with no piers is what the Realm is obliged to keep.

They are consequently both obsolete and permanent, which passengers find funny and the authority does not.

Governance

The authority

The airport is run by a federal airports authority, a statutory body created to hold the capital’s two federal fields, with a board appointed partly by the federal government, partly by the Province of Virginia and partly by the Columbia District.

It is answerable, in practice, to none of them. Each appointing government can be told by the other two that a decision was not theirs, the authority can be criticised by all three simultaneously, and no single minister has ever been able to instruct it.

Whether this is a scandal or the reason the place functions is a genuine question. An airport that could be directed by the District would serve the District, an airport directed by Virginia would tax it, and an airport directed by ministers would have been used as a political instrument several times over. The present arrangement produces an institution that answers to nobody and is therefore free to take twenty-year decisions, which is exactly the criticism and exactly the defence.

Three governments and no owner

The unresolved question is whose airport it is.

Virginia carries the noise, the road traffic and the land use, and receives the rates and the employment. The District generates most of the passengers, holds the institutions the airport exists to serve, and controls nothing whatever. The federal government wanted a capital airport, built one, and has spent sixty years declining to pay for the means of reaching it.

Every substantial argument about the place resolves into that triangle, and none of the three parties has ever been willing to concede the point that would settle it.

The railway

The corridor that stayed empty

The 1960 plan reserved a strip down the centre of the access road for a railway. The land was bought, graded and left.

For roughly sixty years the capital of the Realm had no rail connection to its principal airport, and the reservation was visible from every car on the approach: a wide grassed median running arrow-straight for twenty miles between the carriageways, mown at public expense, waiting.

Sixty years

The reasons are entirely ordinary and are therefore worse. The federal government held that ground transport within a polity was the polity’s business. Virginia held that a federal airport serving a federal capital was a federal responsibility. The District, which would have benefited most and had no jurisdiction over any of the route, was not in a position to build anything and was in a position to complain, which it did.

Successive schemes were designed, costed, agreed in principle and abandoned at the point of allocating money. The corridor was preserved throughout, because nobody was willing to be the government that built over it and made the failure permanent.

What eventually opened

A line was finally built and opened in recent years, decades late and considerably more expensive than any of the schemes that had been rejected, which is the usual arithmetic of delay.

It is used, it works, and it is universally regarded in the capital as a monument to something other than competence. The grassed median it runs down had been mown for two generations.

The capital’s airports

Columbia Regional

The close-in field the new airport was built to relieve did not close, because it is fifteen minutes from Parliament House and the people who would have had to close it are the people who use it.

Columbia Regional survives with short runways, small aircraft, a strict cap on the number of movements, and a statutory limit on how far a flight may travel from it, which exists specifically to prevent it drawing traffic away from George Washington. The perimeter rule is a legal fiction with a straightforwardly political purpose and everybody knows it.

Every few years a member proposes relaxing the cap, usually one whose constituency lies just beyond it. The authority explains why not. The proposal fails, and returns.

The renamings

The other difference between the two airports is that people call this one by its name.

Parliament has twice attached a politician’s name to the close-in field, on both occasions a recent or serving figure, and on both occasions the District carried on calling it what it had always called it. Signage was changed, the announcement changed, the taxi drivers did not, and neither did anybody else.

The name on George Washington International belongs to a man dead more than two centuries who is not a party to any living argument, and it has never been questioned once. The contrast is a standing joke in the capital and is a reasonably exact lesson in how names actually attach to places.

Baltimore-Chesapeake

The third field of the capital region is Baltimore-Chesapeake Airport, in the Province of Maryland, developed from a wartime airfield and not run by the federal authority.

It serves the low-fare and charter traffic the two federal airports price out, it is cheaper to fly from and considerably less convenient to reach, and it is where Southwest Airlines operates in the capital region, which is characteristic of that company’s preference for the second airport in any market. A traveller paying their own fare frequently uses it. A traveller whose fare is paid by the government does not.

State and diplomatic traffic

Who flies the sovereign

The King, the Governor-General and the Prime Minister are flown by the Royal American Air Force, and routine government movement uses a military airfield elsewhere in the capital region rather than this one.

Formal occasions are different. A state departure or a ceremonial arrival is staged here, because the pictures are better: an aircraft on an open apron in front of a building the whole world recognises is a national image, and a military field is a national image of a different and less welcoming kind.

The Realm is therefore in the position of conducting its state flying from one airport and its state photography from another, which officials do not describe in those terms and which is what the arrangement amounts to.

The traffic nobody sees

The capital receives foreign ministers, delegations, negotiating teams and heads of government continuously, and the overwhelming majority of it passes through the ordinary terminals with nobody noticing at all.

There is a modest state pavilion for the occasions that require one. It is used far less than visitors expect, partly because most official travel is not ceremonial and partly because a delegation that wishes not to be photographed arriving is best served by walking through the same hall as everybody else.

The border

Subjects of the sister realms clear through a separate channel under the personal union arrangements, and it is noticeably quicker.

This is constitutionally coherent. It is also, to a traveller from a country the Realm calls a friend and an ally, a visible hierarchy of welcome in the first room they stand in. The European Concert has raised it more than once, in language that gets slightly less diplomatic each time, and the Realm’s answer has been that a shared Crown is a fact and not a preference.

The airlines

Pan American maintains its smallest and least commercially justified hub here. The flag carrier is expected to carry the official traffic of the federal capital, the official traffic of the federal capital is not sufficient to fill a hub, and the arrangement survives on the difference between what a public corporation is for and what it can defend in its accounts.

American Airlines and the other trunk carriers compete hard for the contractor and departmental traffic, which is large, price-sensitive in a way official travel is not supposed to be, and awarded by tender.

The foreign presence is heavier than the passenger numbers justify. A great many countries want their flag on the departure board of the Realm’s capital and will fly a thin service to get it, and the authority has never discouraged them.

The corridor

Farmland to data halls

The land around the airport was bought as farms and is now one of the densest concentrations of network infrastructure on earth.

Federal contractors came first, because proximity to the capital and to an airport is what a contractor sells. The data centres followed, because the corridor had power, fibre, cheap flat land and a hundred organisations that needed to be near each other, and because networks concentrate wherever networks already are. A very large share of the world’s internet traffic now physically passes through buildings within a few miles of the runways.

What that means

The airport was built for aeroplanes and the land around it turned out to be worth more for cables.

It is also, quietly, where a substantial part of the Realm’s information actually lives, which gives the corridor a significance in the Digital Age that has nothing to do with aviation and which is not much discussed. The apparatus that screens passengers without their noticing is not, physically, very far from the terminal in which they are not noticing it.

Openness

What did not change here

The Realm’s response to May Day was to keep its termini as they were, improve the security around them, and move the screening out of sight. This airport is where that decision is easiest to see.

A person may still walk into the terminal without a ticket. Families meet arriving passengers where the doors open rather than behind a barrier in a hall. The concourses are public. Schools bring children to watch aircraft from the glass wall, which they have done since 1962 and which nobody has stopped.

A traveller from almost anywhere else finds this astonishing in the capital of a country that lost two thousand people to an attack on its transport, and is right to.

How it works in practice

The arrangement is not an absence of security and the authority is careful to say so, in language that has been refined over two decades to convey as little as possible.

A passenger’s information is examined long before they reach the building, against holdings the passenger cannot see and could not correct. Officers work the concourses in ordinary clothes and in numbers nobody publishes. The staff of every business on the field, including the shops and the cleaners, are trained to report and are periodically reminded to. The Constabulary’s presence is real, armed and deliberately not conspicuous, and the airport’s own security directorate holds a liaison relationship with the Royal American Signals Directorate that is acknowledged and not described.

None of that requires a queue. That is the entire insight of the settlement: the things which actually prevent an attack are done to information and to organisation, and the things which are done to the person at the barrier are largely done for the benefit of the people watching.

What it costs

The article is required to say the rest, because the openness is not free and is not a boast.

Everything that a checkpoint would do is still done. Passenger data is examined before anyone reaches the building, watch lists are consulted, records are shared under lawful instruction, plain-clothes officers work the halls, and staff are trained and expected to report. The screening did not go away. It went behind the wall.

What that trades is contestability. A passenger stopped at a barrier knows they have been stopped and can ask why. A passenger who is quietly flagged, declined, or watched through a public hall in which they believe themselves unobserved does not necessarily know anything has happened, and cannot challenge what they have not been told about. The greeting areas are real and so is that, and the same policy produced both.

Whether it holds

It has held for twenty-two years, in the most obviously exposed building in the Realm.

Whether it holds because the reasoning is right, or because nothing has yet happened to test it, is not a question anybody can answer. Every official asked has declined to, which is the honest response and is not a reassuring one.

Getting there

Twenty-five miles

The distance is the airport’s permanent political problem and the reason Columbia Regional survives.

Twenty-five miles is nothing in a car at eleven at night and a great deal at eight in the morning, and the access road, which was built generously in 1960 and has been widened twice, carries a volume its designers would not have credited. A minister with a committee at ten and a flight arriving at eight is making a decision about risk, and a great many of them make it by using the other airport.

The road and the coaches

For most of the airport’s life the road was the only way, which produced an ecosystem: scheduled coaches from the capital’s main railway terminus, hotel shuttles, a very large car park estate, and a licensed taxi arrangement that has been the subject of three separate inquiries into who is permitted to pick up and on what terms.

The car parks are among the authority’s largest sources of revenue, which is a fact the rail campaigners have raised for sixty years and which the authority has never satisfactorily answered.

What the railway changed

Less than its advocates promised and more than its opponents expected.

The line carries a substantial share of leisure passengers and airport staff, both of whom are price-sensitive and time-flexible, and a much smaller share of official and business travellers, who are neither. Journey times are competitive with the road at the worst hours and are not at the best. Nobody has yet closed a car park.

What it changed most is the argument. It is no longer possible to say the capital has no rail link to its airport, which removes a complaint the District had been making since before most of its officials were born, and which several of them privately miss.

Operations

Weather

Summer thunderstorms close the field regularly and the consequences propagate nationally, because a capital airport delays ministers, committees, delegations and the officials who make government work. A bad afternoon here is reported as news in a way a bad afternoon anywhere else is not.

Capacity

The airport has room, which is the vindication of 1960 and the thing that distinguishes it from every other airport in these articles. It has added capacity repeatedly without a public inquiry, because the land was bought before there was anybody to object.

Freight

The freight operation is large, runs at night when the passenger terminal is dark, and is invisible to almost everyone who uses the place. A capital consumes an extraordinary quantity of documents, equipment, diplomatic bags, pharmaceuticals and machinery, and lately a great deal of hardware bound for the data halls next door.

The workforce

Tens of thousands of people work on the field, of whom the authority directly employs a minority. The rest work for airlines, handling agents, caterers, cleaners, security contractors and freight firms.

It is the same contracting structure whose consequences Pan American discovered at Kennedy on May Day, when it sorted its dead into those it had employed and those it had merely contracted. Nobody here has established who would be counted as this airport’s dead, and nobody has asked.

The building as a public place

What it is used for besides flying

A protected building of that quality in the capital region is not left alone, and the authority has spent decades negotiating between an operating airport and a national monument.

The hall is used for occasions: receptions for state visits, the reception of returning forces, the lying of a coffin on its way somewhere, and, twice, a memorial service that could not be held anywhere else because nowhere else in the capital region could hold the number of people. Filming is permitted and controlled. School parties come, and have since 1962, and the authority’s education programme is older than most of the airlines using the field.

The conservation argument

Every proposal to alter anything runs into the protection, and the protection is not a formality.

Signage, lighting, retail, seating, security screens and the ordinary accumulated furniture of a modern terminal all have to be argued for individually and are frequently refused. The authority regards this as an operating cost and pays it, on the reasoning that a building people come to look at is worth more than the shops it could otherwise hold.

The result is a terminal noticeably emptier than its equivalents, with less retail than an airport of its size would normally carry and a great deal of unobstructed floor. Passengers experience this as calm. Commercial directors experience it as revenue that is not there, and say so at every review.

Climate

The airfield’s own emissions are ordinary for its size and it has the ordinary programmes.

The argument about the region’s environmental load has largely moved next door. The data halls in the corridor consume electricity and water on a scale that dwarfs the airport, the Realm’s growing demand for them shows no sign of slowing, and the local dispute that was once about aircraft noise is now mostly about cooling and the grid.

The airport now

Its position

It handles more passengers than at any point in its history, in a building designed for a fraction of them and enlarged exactly as its architect specified, on a site that will not run out.

Admired at a distance

It is admired at a distance and resented in use. Everyone in the capital agrees the terminal is magnificent and would rather fly from Columbia Regional, which is twenty miles nearer and where the aircraft are smaller and the queues shorter. The airport people are proud of is not the airport they choose, which is a fair description of a good deal of public architecture.

What it is for

The question underneath the jurisdictional one is what a capital airport is actually for, and the Realm has never had to answer it because the answer has never been tested.

Commercially it is a large airport of the second rank: substantial, profitable enough, and not a global hub in the way Kennedy or Heathrow are, because the Columbia District generates official traffic rather than the connecting traffic that makes a hub. Its foreign services are thicker than its passenger numbers justify, because countries fly to capitals for reasons that are not commercial.

What it is really for is the thing it was built for in 1958, which is that a country of the Realm’s standing must be able to receive the world’s aircraft at its seat of government, and must be seen to. That is not a proposition anybody has to defend in a select committee, and it is the reason a facility of this quality exists twenty-five miles from a city that would not, on traffic alone, have built it.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Columbia Regional - the close-in field this airport was built to relieve, which did not close
• Columbia District - the federal capital district the airport serves and does not sit in
• Province of Virginia - the polity that carries the noise and receives the rates
• Province of Maryland - which holds Baltimore-Chesapeake, the region’s third field
• Pan American World Airways - the flag carrier, whose smallest hub is here
• American Airlines - the largest competitor for the capital’s contractor traffic
• Southwest Airlines - which serves the capital region from the third airport instead
• The May Day Bombings (2006) - the attack after which the Realm chose not to rebuild its termini

Categories

Land & Landscape · Aviation · Columbia District · Province of Virginia