A problem that Eero Saarinen wanted to solve with his design for Washington Dulles International Airport was distance. Specifically the distance travelers had to walk to reach their planes.
Or, as the narrator of the 1958 short video, The Expanding Airport, from Charles and Ray Eames who worked with Saarinen on the mobile lounges that came to define Dulles, put it:
“Necessary spreading of facilities to accommodate equipment has given the old hikes new dimensions. Up and down ramps, along corridors, in and out of doors, and loaded with hand luggage. Walks, which were once filled with romantic anticipation of adventure, will become more and more irritating.”
An epidemic of walking was about to descend on air travelers that the mobile lounges, or their sister transport plane mates, would solve.
It did not work out that way. Aside from Dulles, few other airports — Montreal’s Mirabel Airport and Baltimore-Washington International Airport among them — ever used them.
Walking distances at airports, however, only lengthened in the ensuing decades. Just ask anyone who has had to change planes recently at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport or London’s Heathrow Airport.
President Trump wants to change that. Plans for new terminals, concourses and AeroTrain extensions at Dulles that could fundamentally change the airport are under consideration. The National Capital Planning Commission, the agency that oversees planning for all federal projects in the DC region, will hear an information presentation at its next meeting on March 5.
Jeremy Stone, the aviation entrepreneur behind the startup Eden Blue, agrees with Trump that the Dulles needs a rethink. The mobile lounges? “Dreadful.”
The airport long since stopped living up to Saarinen’s vision of a soaring terminal with transports taking travelers directly to their planes, the mobile lounges being relegated to the role of terminal-to-concourse and concourse-to-customs transports.
Stone does not want to throw out Saarinen’s vision. Rather, he wants to celebrate it by replacing the aging mobile lounges with with new “Direct Jet Transport,” or DJT — a not so subtle nod to the 47th president’s initials — technology. The all-electric transports are essentially glass boxes on wheels with off-the-shelf lift technology to transport up to 90 fliers directly to their plane.
Stone recently sat down with Airport Architecture to discuss Eden Blue’s proposal.
The conversation is edited for length and clarity.
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