20th century The first airport in the area was
Arlington's
Hoover Field, which opened in 1926. Near the present site of
the Pentagon, its single runway was crossed by a street; guards had to stop automobile traffic during takeoffs and landings. The following year, in 1927, Washington Airport, another privately operated field, began service next door. In 1930, the
Great Depression led the two terminals to merge to form
Washington-Hoover Airport. Bordered on the east by
U.S. Route 1, with its accompanying high-tension electrical wires, and obstructed by a high smokestack on one approach and a dump nearby, the field was inadequate.
Douglas DC-3 in the foreground and
Downtown Washington, D.C., seen following a take off in March 2016 The need for a better airport was acknowledged in 37 studies conducted between 1926 and 1938, The airport is located southwest of
Washington, D.C., in the
Crystal City section of
Arlington County, Virginia, adjacent to
National Landing. The western part of the airport was once within a large Virginia plantation, a remnant of which is now inside a historic site near the airport's Metrorail station. The eastern part of the airport was built in the District of Columbia on and near
mudflats in the tidal
Potomac River near
Gravelly Point, about from the
United States Capitol, using
landfill dredged from the
Potomac River. The airport opened June 16, 1941, just before U.S. entry into
World War II. In 1945 Congress passed a law that established the airport was legally within Virginia, mainly for liquor sales taxation purposes, but under the
jurisdiction of the federal government. Until 1946, nonstop airline flights did not reach beyond
New York City,
Detroit,
Cincinnati,
Memphis,
Atlanta, and
Jacksonville. In 1946,
Boston,
Chicago,
Dallas, and
Miami were added; nonstops reached
Denver in 1951 and
Los Angeles in 1954. The April 1957
Official Airline Guide shows 316 weekday departures: 95
Eastern (plus six per week to/from South America), 77
American, 61
Capital, 23
National, 17
TWA, 10
United, 10
Delta, 6
Allegheny, 6
Braniff, 5
Piedmont, 3
Northeast and 3
Northwest. Jet flights began in April 1966 (727-200s were not allowed until 1970). In 1974 the airport's key carriers were Eastern (20 destinations), United (14 destinations after subsuming Capital) and Allegheny (11 destinations). The grooving of runway 18–36 to improve traction when wet, in March 1967, was the first at a civil airport in the United States. Service to the airport's
Metro station began in 1977. The Washington National Airport Terminal and South Hangar Line were listed on the
National Register of Historic Places in 1997.
Expansion and restrictions The runway layout has changed little since the 1956 closure of the east–west runway at the south end of the field. Changes to the terminal complex over the years include: • Extension of the original Main Terminal (today's Terminal 1) to the south in 1950 • The construction of a North Terminal supplemented the original terminal in 1958; construction connected the two terminals in 1961. • A United Airlines holdroom complex was built in 1965, a facility for American Airlines was completed in 1968, and a facility for Northwest Airlines and TWA (still in use today as the Terminal A concourse), along with a commuter terminal in 1970. • In March 2012 the main 01/19 runway was lengthened to add Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) compliant runway safety runoff areas. Despite the expansions, efforts have been made to restrict the growth of the airport. The advent of jets and traffic growth led Congress to pass the Washington Airport Act of 1950, which led to the opening of
Dulles International Airport in 1962. To reduce congestion and drive traffic to alternative airports, the
FAA imposed perimeter restrictions on National when jets arrived in 1966, and
landing slots at DCA and four other high-density airports in 1969. The airport originally had no perimeter rule; from 1954 to 1960, piston-engine airliners flew nonstop to California. Scheduled jet airliners were not allowed until April 1966, and concerns about
aviation noise led to noise restrictions even before jet service began in 1966. The perimeter rule was implemented in January 1966 as a voluntary agreement by airlines, to get permission to use short-haul jets at National. Dulles was to continue to serve the long haul markets, limiting traffic and noise at National; the FAA assumed that ground level noise would be reduced because planes would take off light on fuel and be up and away quickly. The agreement limited jet flights to , with 7 grandfathered exceptions under . The spirit of the agreement was regularly violated as flights left National to an airport within the perimeter and then immediately took off for a destination beyond it. Within a year there was a proposal to reduce the perimeter to , but it was widely opposed and never implemented. Overcrowding at National was later managed by the 1969 High Density Rule, thereby removing one of the justifications for the perimeter agreement. In the 1960s and 1970s, several attempts were made to codify the perimeter rule, but it was not until Dulles was endangered that it actually become a strict rule. In 1970 the FAA lifted the ban at National of the stretched Boeing 727-200, which resulted in a lawsuit by Virginians for Dulles who argued that the airport's jet traffic was a nuisance. That suit resulted in a Court of Appeals order to create an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). In addition to the court order, there were economic problems at Dulles. Following the extension of
Metrorail to National in 1977, and
airline deregulation in 1978, traffic at Dulles began to plummet while it increased at National. As part of a slate of efforts to protect Dulles, including removing landing fees and mobile lounge user charges, the FAA proposed regulations as part of the EIS to limit traffic at National and maintain Dulles's role as the area's airport for long-haul destinations. In 1980, the FAA proposed codifying the perimeter rule as part of a larger rulemaking effort. When the rule was announced, airlines challenged it in court; the Metropolitan Washington Airports Policy of 1981 codified the perimeter rule on an interim basis "to maintain the long-haul nonstop service at Dulles and BWI which otherwise would preempt shorter haul service at National." At the same time, the perimeter was extended to miles to remove the unfairness of having seven grandfathered cities. The perimeter rule was upheld by the Court of Appeals in 1982. JetBlue and
Southwest acquired 12 and 27 US Airways slot pairs, respectively, in 2014 as part of a government-mandated divestiture following the merger of US Airways and American.
Transfer of control and renaming . In 1984, the Secretary of Transportation
Elizabeth Dole appointed a commission to study transferring National and Dulles Airports from the
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to a local entity, which could use airport revenues to finance improvements. transferred control of the airport from the FAA to the new Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority with the Authority's decisions being subject to a Congressional review panel. The constitutionality of the review panel was later challenged in the
Supreme Court and the Court has twice declared the oversight panel unconstitutional. Even after this decision, however, Congress has continued to intervene in the management of the airports. On February 6, 1998, President
Bill Clinton signed legislation changing the airport's name from Washington National Airport to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, to honor the former president on his 87th birthday. The legislation was drafted against the wishes of MWAA officials and political leaders in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. The bill stated that it did not require the expenditure of any funds to accomplish the name change; later, state, regional, and federal authorities were required to change highway and transit signs at their own additional expense as new signs were made.
21st century In 2015,
The Express conducted an online survey asking people what they call "the airport in
Northern Virginia that's not
Dulles". The results found that only 31% of people referred to the airport as "Reagan" and only 12% as "Reagan National", compared to 57% dropping the former president from the name. Political preference was shown to have a direct correlation with how people called the airport, with 72% of Republicans referring to the airport using "Reagan," while 64% of Democrats call it "National" or "DCA."
Concerns about air traffic risks and ongoing scrutiny On March 23, 2011, the air traffic control supervisor on duty reportedly fell asleep during the night shift. Two aircraft on approach to the airport were unable to contact anyone in the
control tower and landed unassisted. On January 31, 2025, the
FAA announced they would restrict helicopter flights from the airport following
a mid-air collision two days prior. This had taken place over the
Potomac River and involved American Eagle Flight No. 5342, which had arrived from Wichita, Kansas and was set to land at the airport, and a Sikorsky H-60 U.S. Army helicopter undergoing a training exercise, which had previously taken off from Reagan National Airport. The incident was the first major U.S. commercial airliner crash since the
2009 crash near Buffalo, New York. On March 11, 2025, U.S. Transportation Secretary
Sean Duffy announced an extended ban on helicopters from flying on the route where the January 2025 collision took place while planes were launching from runway 15/33 at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Construction of current terminal buildings section of
Arlington County in the background (background), and tracks for the
Washington Metro (left) With the addition of more flights and limited space in the aging main terminal, the airport began an extensive renovation and expansion in the 1990s. Hangar 11 on the northern end of the airport was converted into The USAir Interim Terminal, designed by Joseph C. Giuliani, FAIA. Soon after an addition for Delta Air Lines was added in 1989 and was later converted to Authority offices. These projects allowed for the relocation of several gates in the main terminal until the new $450 million terminal complex became operational. On July 27, 1997, the new terminal complex, Terminal 2, and two parking garages, opened.
Argentine architect
César Pelli designed the new terminals of the airport. The Interim Terminal closed immediately after its opening and was converted back into a hangar. One pier of the main terminal (now widely known as Terminal A), which mainly housed American Airlines and
Pan Am, was demolished; the other pier, originally designed by Giuliani Associates Architects for Northwest and TWA remains operational today as gates A1–A9. MWAA began construction of a new concourse north of Terminal 2 in February 2018 to accommodate 14 new regional jet gates with jetways, bringing the total number of gates at DCA to 60. This replaced "Gate 35X," a bus gate formerly used to bring passengers to and from
American Eagle flights that used parking spots on the ramp. Officially called Project Journey, construction was completed on April 20, 2021. A land bridge is planned that would connect the airport with National Landing directly to
Amazon HQ2. ==Operations==