#4 Story of 2016: Reagan National Airport to Undergo Massive $1B Renovation

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, across the Potomac River from the nation's capital, will undergo a massive $1 billion renovation, its managers announced this week. 
 

The airport in Arlington, Virginia turned 75 years old this month. Despite its being in better condition than other major airports, such as New York's La Guardia, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority plans to add 1.1 million square feet to the airport.

The added space would shorten security lines and improve customers' experiences while traveling, the authority said.

More than 23 million passengers used National last year, making it the second-busiest airport in the region, after Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. Last year was its sixth straight year of record-high passenger traffic. And there is little indication it will taper off.

And that’s the problem.

Such phenomenal growth was not part of the original plan for the airport, which sits on 860 acres of infill in the Potomac River.

But in the years since President Franklin D. Roosevelt watched the first American Airlines DC-3 aircraft touch down on the runway, the airport has grown in ways that few could have anticipated. It now serves more passengers than Dulles International — an airport 14 times its size.

The irony is that while airport officials have fought against growth at National, they have been forced to accommodate it.

They have reconfigured space, even re-purposing storage closets and conference rooms to manage the passenger boom. In 2014, they spent $37 million to remake historic Terminal A, adding security lanes and brightening the interior.

This fall, they will break ground on the airport’s biggest building project in nearly two decades. The centerpiece of the ambitious $1 billion program will be a new commuter concourse on the airport’s north side.

The building will replace Gate 35X — a notorious choke point where travelers, in rain, sun or snow, are required to board shuttle buses to get to their planes.

"Over the next four years, there's going to be a transformation of the passenger experience at Reagan National to decrease congestion near the gate and to improve passenger flow through the terminal," said MWAA spokesman Rob Yingling.

The authority released a video that shows security checkpoints being moved and housed under the roadway west of the airport, toward Crystal City.

 
Some of the checkpoints will be underground and have natural light coming in through glass ceiling panels. Terminal C, which currently houses the airport's executive offices, will be transformed to hold short-hop flights.

The authority said much of the construction will be done overnight so as not to interfere with airport traffic. The work will not begin until spring 2017 and is expected to be completed by 2021.