United Enters the Dulles Chat
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has a plan for Washington Dulles International Airport.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has a big, bold, beautiful plan for Washington Dulles International Airport.
“We have a plan that we presented to build what will be, I think, the best airport in the country when it’s done. Our design [is] operationally good for airlines, a beautiful big open terminal and spaces,” Kirby said in a fireside chat with veteran journalist Lori Aratani at the airline’s media day in Los Angeles this week.
That presentation, Kirby said, was to President Trump who is pushing to revitalize Washington, D.C.’s main gateway to the world. The White House has held at least two meetings on the topic since the DOT received 21 public proposals to reimagine Dulles in January. Proposals came from architectural big names, including Grimshaw Architects and Zaha Hadid Architects, and, now we know, United itself.
United is part of the Dulles conversation for good reason. The airline carried two-thirds of the airport’s passengers in 2025, making it the carrier’s sixth largest hub, schedule data from aviation analytics firm Cirium shows.
What is United’s vision for Dulles? Kirby left us some crumbs.
Airlines have a checkered past when it comes to airport design. Projects tend to follow a similar pattern: impressive edifices that symbolize an imperial phase for the airline in question that then retain that impressiveness or descend into cattle-car squalor in sync with the fortunes of said airline.
The best example is the TWA Flight Center by Eero Saarinen at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. Opened in 1962, it became a reinforced-concrete symbol of the jet age that was quickly overwhelmed by the growth of air travel and fell into disrepair amid the struggles of its namesake airline. The building was only really revived with the opening of the TWA Hotel in 2019.
Other examples include McNamara Terminal by SmithGroup (opened 2002) at Detroit Metro Airport1 built by Northwest Airlines and now used by Delta Air Lines, Terminal 1 by Helmut Jahn (opened 1987) at Chicago O’Hare International Airport by United, and Terminal C by Corgan and Gensler (completed 2024) at New York’s LaGuardia Airport by Delta.
Most airport works, even if they are intended for primarily one airline, are led by the airport with input from the carrier.
Then there is the “temporary” Concourse C-D at Dulles, with its corrugated metal siding and drop ceilings. The work of United and defunct Presidential Airways it was a short-term solution for the 1980s era of hub building. Thank you, Richard Ferris.2
A response to federal inaction
Concourse C-D was built, as The Washington Post put it in 1987, as a “temporary solution to the gate shortage that has taken place at Dulles as its business has soared.” Saarinen’s plan when Dulles opened in 1962 was for fliers to use mobile lounges and planemates to ride directly from boarding gates at the back of the main terminal to waiting planes — no concourses required. It was only with the air traffic boom of the 1980s and the creation of the hub-and-spoke airline system that is standard today did the need for physical concourses and gates arise.
The U.S. Department of Transportation, the operator of Dulles until the creation of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) in 1987, acknowledged the need for a permanent midfield facility, Post reports indicate. But were hamstrung by a lack of Congressional funding.
Congress, former Virginia Governor Linwood Holton told the Post in 1985, had “too many other things that it is worried about” to fund a new concourse at Dulles.
C-D began as two separate midfield terminals — called such for their location between Dulles’ two parallel runways — in the mid-1980s. Presidential opened the first section of what is today D3 in December 1985 followed by United with the first section of C in May 1986, based on Post reporting. Subsequent expansions included investments by American Airlines, Pan Am and TWA.
These were not glamorous structures, despite what Presidential wanted fliers to believe with ads touting VIP amenities and a sculptural rotunda. The Post in 1987 described United’s midfield concourse as a “temporary structure built of trailers on Dulles’ jet ramp.”
The midfield terminals were expanded and linked via the single most colorful spot in all of Dulles by 1989 and have formed the backbone of United’s hub there ever since.
Steps toward a C-D replacement
“Only in aviation does ‘temporary’ mean 45 years,” Kirby said Tuesday with a chuckle.
He’s not wrong. Travelers, and even MWAA, have sought a replacement for Concourse C-D since almost the day it opened. Economic downturns, changes of airline fortune and other capital projects kept taking precedent — until now.
Concourse E, the first 14-gate phase of a new midfield concourse south of C-D, is under construction and set to open later in 2026. The first phase will not replace C-D; rather it will allow the closure and demolition of the Concourse A regional gates by HOK (opened 1999).
The second phase, the central portion of the future Concourse E-F, will allow MWAA to begin demolishing C-D. That section, unfortunately, is not set to open until 2030 or 2031 under the current timeline.
Enter President Trump.
“It’s got a beautiful terminal … one of the greatest architects in the world at the time. And so they have a great building and a bad airport, but we’re gonna turn that around,” Trump said of Dulles in December.
Trump subsequent set about his administration to revitalize Dulles with an eye on speed. He wants measurable improvements within his term that ends in January 2029. In a world where airport improvements take years, if not decades, to complete that is an audacious goal.
Airport Architecture understands that the administration is considering numerous funding models to accelerate improvements at Dulles, including some form of a public-private partnership where private investors would foot the bulk of the cost.
Kirby, while part of but certainly not leading the conversation, hinted at his vision for Dulles. It includes all the adjectives one would expect from an airline CEO pitching a project to the traveling public: bright, spacious and airy with all the posh amenities befitting his airline’s premium push.
At the same time, Kirby’s “operationally good for airlines” comment implied that the parallel linear concourse layout pioneered by Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and widely acknowledged as one of the most efficient for airline operations — it is also codified in MWAA’s master plan for Dulles — is part of that vision.
Kirby even hinted that the terminal connector, part of MWAA’s plan to replace the aging mobile lounges, will be built when he said that United is planning a new lounge in said connector. The structure that would link Concourse A-B to the main terminal allowing arriving international travelers to walk directly to customs.
A United Club, or more premium Polaris lounge, in the proposed terminal connector implies United may move or shift some flights to Concourse A-B in the future. Those plans, as United Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Nocella reminded Kirby, are “secret” without divulging anything further.
How the plan progresses, and if any of the grandiose architectural plans for Dulles come to pass, is still very much TBD. The easiest path forward remains finding funding to accelerate MWAA’s master plan.
And the mobile lounges that are widely disliked — yet beloved by AvGeeks and kids alike — and the origin of Trump’s ire with the airport?
“We will get rid of the mobile lounges and have a train,” Kirby told Aratani.
The McNamara Terminal is one that has beat the disrepair odds and remains, more than two decades after opening, among the best airport terminals in the U.S.
Ferris led United’s parent company UAL Corporation, and later Allegis, from 1979 until 1987.
Presidential sold its Dulles midfield terminal to Continental in 1987.
I was at Continental when we took over Presidential's former IAD terminal in 1987. IAD was so distant from Washington's city center that we joked IAD was the industry's first "wayport."