A City Where Nobody Lives
Inside - *really* inside - Dulles International Airport
Quick note: This is piece #801 at this newsletter—I can now say “over 800 pieces”! I greatly appreciate your subscription, to help go to 900, 1,000, and beyond. Thank you!
So I took this video a few months ago:
I was standing just a couple hundred feet from the main runway at Dulles International Airport, and this is an Airbus A-380 jumbo jet taking off.
No, I didn’t sneak in and snoop around (like I felt I had when I was picking someone up and observed hundreds of lost pieces of luggage and read some of the names on the tags). I was here for a tour.
I also took the new Silver Line Metro extension, just to see what it would be like to arrive at an airport by train, which I’ve never done. My home is actually closer to the airport than it is to the closest Metro station, but it was very cool to step from the Metro platform down into the caverns of the place and emerge in the terminal. And you get this awesome view as the train approaches (it was raining that day):
I wrote about my tour over at The Bulwark: specifically how, as a former public policy grad student, the airport reminded me of a city. I felt like I was meeting chiefs and department heads and mayors and aides. And I thought about the yawning gap between partisan politics and showmanship and the boring but crucial work of maintaining civic infrastructure. Check it out for some thoughts on policy and politics.
But here, I’m going to share the photos. Our tour guide not only told us we were allowed to share these photos, he encouraged us to share them. Anything we were permitted to see in person, we were free to photograph and share. These guys are proud of the work they do. These tours fill up. I thought an airport tour might be a little bit arcane, but everyone was so down to earth, and everyone plays some small part in making this thing work. It’s very cool. It makes me proud to live in Northern Virginia.
I can’t top the jumbo jet takeoff, but here’s the fire chief demonstrating an airport-grade fire engine for us:
There’s nothing grand about most of the facilities here, especially the non-public-facing ones. The fire department building is practical and workaday. Badges and keys are out for clocking-in employees to grab (anyone could have snagged one as a souvenir). Giant maps of the airport and surrounding areas adorn the halls. The break room is a few chairs and a coffee pot. There was a little barbecue grill/smoker combo in the middle of the fire engine garage. It almost felt like being invited into someone’s home.
This is work. It’s not the kind of work I’ve ever done.
After the firehouse tour, we rolled, in our very own people-mover, over runway-adjacent roads.
We were headed to the control tower, in the base of which sits the police HQ and the monitor bank, with selected live feeds from hundreds of security cameras around the property. Before we entered, we saw this sign:
Inside, one of the airport cops explained the job and the office to us. It reminded me of an operations tour we had of our campus, back in grad school, where we also saw one of these police rooms.
A red phone!
Look, we’re on the calendar! (“1100 AVGEEK tour.”)
All of the pictures aren’t going to fit, so I’m going to have a part two here, to show you the rest, which is even more no-public-entry than all this. Stay tuned!
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I’m curious if there is a practical reason the airport fire trucks have those star-wars looking front ends, as opposed to the usual fire trucks we see. Better visibility?