Dallas Fort Worth International Airport
Facts on DFW
DFW exists because two rival cities were finally forced together: Dallas first proposed a joint airport with Fort Worth back in 1927, but it took a 1964 federal ultimatum -- agree on a site voluntarily or have the government pick one -- before the two cities settled on a location, and the airport opened as Dallas/Fort Worth Regional Airport on January 13, 1974.
Source: Wikipedia
When it opened in 1974, DFW's roughly 17,500-acre property made it the largest airport in the world by land area.
Source: Wikipedia
DFW set a new passenger record in 2023, serving 81,764,044 passengers and topping 80 million for the first time in its history.
Source: Wikipedia
A joint Dallas-Fort Worth airport nearly happened decades earlier than it did: in 1940 American Airlines and Braniff backed a plan to build one in Arlington, but the two cities couldn't agree and the project was abandoned in 1942, leaving Fort Worth to build its own Amon Carter Field on the same site after the war.
Source: Wikipedia
DFW's dedication ceremony, held September 20-23, 1973 before the airport had even opened for commercial service, included the first landing of a Concorde on U.S. soil -- a pre-production aircraft wearing both Air France and British Airways colors, arriving from Caracas.
Source: Wikipedia
American Airlines, headquartered near DFW, runs the second-largest single-airline hub in the world there, behind only Delta's hub in Atlanta; as of April 2023 DFW had nonstop service to more destinations than any other airport in North America.
Source: Wikipedia
DFW opened in 1974 with the Airtrans, the world's first fully automated people-mover system; at its peak it ran across 13 miles of guideway and carried as many as 23,000 passengers a day at a top speed of 17 mph, before being phased out in the early 2000s in favor of the Skylink train.
Source: Wikipedia
DFW is the only airport in the world with four paved runways longer than 4,000 meters (13,123 feet); its four primary north-south runways were stretched to that length in stages, one in 1996 and the other three in 2005.
Source: Wikipedia
A 1979 law called the Wright Amendment restricted long-haul flights out of nearby Love Field to protect DFW's traffic; it took a 2006 agreement brokered by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and years more of political wrangling before the restrictions were finally lifted, on October 13, 2014.
Source: Wikipedia