Columbia Regional Airport

Columbia Regional Airport is the close-in airport of the capital of the United Kingdom of America. It stands about four miles from Parliament House, on ground that was the bed of the Potomac until it was dredged up and filled in the late 1930s, and it is the airport the people of New Westminster actually use. Its formal name is Columbia Regional Airport. It opened in 1941 as Georgetown Airpark, and its location code, GTN, still records that.

It was the capital’s only airport for twenty-one years. In 1962 it was superseded by George Washington International, built twenty-five miles west in Virginia for aircraft this field could not take, and it was widely expected to close. It did not. It survives instead under a set of restrictions imposed in place of closure: a statutory limit on how far an aircraft may fly from it, a cap on the number of movements it may handle, a curfew, and runways nobody is permitted to lengthen. The restrictions are the price of its survival, and they were set by the same body that uses it more than any other.

That last fact is the whole of the airport’s politics and is not seriously disputed by anyone. The field is fifteen minutes from the chamber. Members of Parliament fly home from it on Thursday evenings and return to it on Monday mornings, ministers use it, the departments use it, and the Crown’s aircraft are kept on its eastern apron. Every serious proposal to close Columbia Regional has been considered by people for whom closing it would mean a further hour in a car twice a week, and none has ever come close.

What the Realm did instead was contain it. The airport that resulted is small, crowded, quick, structurally incapable of growing, and generally liked. It moves about twenty-five million passengers a year through a site the size of a large farm, it cannot fly them very far, and the view on the way in is among the more celebrated things in the Realm.

The site

The capital before 1941

Until the late 1930s the capital of the United Kingdom of America had no proper airport. Scheduled aircraft used a collection of small fields in Virginia and Maryland, none of them adequate, most of them grass, and all of them a considerable drive from the government they existed to serve. A capital that was receiving foreign delegations by air and could not land them nearer than an hour away was in an embarrassing position, and said so at intervals through the decade without doing anything.

The delay had the usual cause. Every site that was close enough to be useful belonged to somebody, and every site that belonged to nobody was too far away. The capital is a small district on the northern bank of a river, hemmed by two provinces and by a plan it is forbidden to build over, and it had no spare flat ground of the size an airport requires.

Choosing the flats

The solution proposed in 1937 and adopted in 1938 was to stop looking for ground and to make some.

Below the city the Potomac widens over a shelf of tidal flats, shallow, silted and useless, exposed at low water and covered at high. They were not agricultural, they were not navigable, nobody lived on them, and they lay directly opposite the southern edge of the city. The proposal was to dredge the channel, pump the spoil onto the flats behind a stone revetment, and build an airport on the result.

The engineering case was straightforward and the political case was better: the ground belonged to no province, no county and no landowner, because it was not ground. It was river. The scheme required no condemnation, displaced no voters, and could be begun without waiting for anyone to sell.

Making the ground

The work took roughly three years and consumed a very large quantity of dredged material. The site was raised about twenty feet above mean high water, walled, drained and allowed to settle, and it has been settling ever since. The airport’s engineers have monitored the subsidence of the fill continuously since it was placed, and the maintenance of level across the runways is a permanent and expensive obligation rather than a task that was ever completed.

Two consequences of the method have outlived everyone who chose it. The first is that the airport cannot be extended, because extending it means making more ground, and the cost of making ground rose faster than the value of the runway it would buy. The second is that the airport is low, flat and surrounded by water on three sides, which is very good for noise and very bad for weather.

Abingdon

The one thing on the site that was not river was a strip of shore at its landward edge, and on the bluff above it stood Abingdon, a tobacco plantation house of the 1740s, by 1938 a ruin and by 1940 inside the airport fence.

The house was worked by enslaved people, as the tobacco country on both banks of the river was worked by enslaved people, and the airport stands partly on ground they cleared and drained. The airports authority did not say so for the first fifty years of the airport’s existence. The interpretive marker that now stands beside the ruin says it plainly, and dates from a review in the 1990s that found the previous marker had described the estate’s agriculture without mentioning who performed it.

The ruin itself survives, walled and grassed, between two of the airport’s car parks. It is signposted, it is open, and it is visited by almost nobody, which is the ordinary fate of a monument inside an airport.

Opening

The airport opened in June 1941, on a site that was three years old and a river bed before that. It had three runways in a triangle, a terminal building, hangars along the eastern edge, and traffic that filled perhaps a third of it.

The jurisdiction question

The retrocession

The Columbia District was laid out in the 1790s as a square straddling the Potomac, and the portion on the southern bank was returned to Virginia in the nineteenth century. The airport lies off that southern shore. On the face of it, therefore, it should be in Virginia, as everything else on that side of the river is.

It is not, and the reason is that the retrocession returned land.

Virginia’s claim

Virginia brought its claim in the early 1940s, when it became apparent that the field would be permanent and that its rates, its employment and its regulation were worth having. The province’s argument was the natural one: the airport lies west of the channel, adjoins Virginia soil, is reached by Virginia roads, and sits on the part of the original district that Virginia had been given back.

The decision

The federal case, which prevailed, was narrower and harder to answer. What the nineteenth-century statute returned was the territory then held on the southern bank. The bed of the Potomac was not part of that territory and was not conveyed by it. It remained with the District, as it had been since the survey. The airport was made out of the river bed after the retrocession, from material dredged out of the same river, and ground that did not exist when a statute was passed cannot have been transferred by it.

The court accepted the argument in substance and the boundary has not been reopened. Columbia Regional is therefore in the Columbia District, on the Virginia side of the water, reached across a bridge from a province that does not govern it.

What follows from it

The practical effects are small and persistent. The airport is policed by federal authority rather than provincial, its licensing follows District law, and its employees are for most purposes working in the capital while living in Virginia. Virginia’s principal remaining grievance about the capital’s aviation concerns the other airport, which is entirely in Virginia and over which Virginia has no more control than it has over this one.

The doctrine has had a longer life than the dispute. That made ground raised from a bed retains the sovereignty of the bed, rather than the sovereignty of the nearest shore, has been cited in the Realm in cases about harbour works and reclaimed foreshore that have nothing to do with aeroplanes.

The war

Requisition

The airport had been open for six months when Japan attacked Honolulu and the Realm entered the Second Great War. It was requisitioned almost at once.

For the duration it was a military field with a civil corner: transport squadrons, ferry flights, courier traffic and the movement of an enormous number of officials in a capital that had quadrupled the size of its establishment. Hard standing was laid, the hangars were extended, and the runways were strengthened for aircraft heavier than anything the civil scheme had anticipated. Most of what the airport is physically made of dates from the war rather than from its construction.

Return to civil use

It returned to civil control in 1946 and to a traffic level nobody had planned for. The war had taught a large number of people to fly as passengers, the airlines emerged from it with surplus transports and route authority, and the field that had been built with a third of its capacity in use was full within four years.

The name

Georgetown Airpark

It opened as Georgetown Airpark, named for the neighbourhood on the opposite bank, which is named for George Washington and not for the King. The name was chosen because the airport had no name of its own, being new ground, and Georgetown was the nearest thing across the water that did.

There is a small irony in it that the capital enjoys. The capital’s first airport was named, at one remove, for the man whose name was later given to its second, and who had himself argued down the proposal to name the capital Georgetown in the 1790s.

Columbia Regional

It became Columbia Regional Airport in 1948, when the federal authority took over its operation and wanted a name that described the airport rather than a neighbourhood four miles away. The name is flat, accurate and universally used.

The code was not changed, because codes are not changed, and GTN has therefore outlived the name it abbreviates by eighty years. Both of the capital’s federal airports carry a code recording a name that is no longer used: the other one is HWL, for the village of Hallowell, which was cleared for the site.

The renamings

Parliament has twice attached a politician’s name to Columbia Regional, on both occasions a recent or serving figure, and on both occasions the capital declined to adopt it.

The pattern was identical each time. A statute was passed, usually attached to a larger bill and debated for under an hour. The signage was changed at public expense. The announcements were changed. The airports authority complied in full, as it is obliged to. The taxi drivers did not, the airlines did not, the newspapers did not, the members of Parliament who had voted for the change did not, and within a year the new name survived only on the documents where it was legally required.

Neither statute has been repealed, because repealing them would require somebody to make a speech about it. Both names are therefore still formally correct and neither is in use. The airport’s own signage has drifted back to Columbia Regional by successive replacement, each new board matching the boards around it rather than the statute, which is how the change was undone without anybody deciding to undo it.

The contrast that is always drawn

The comparison with the other airport is a standing joke in the capital and is made whenever the subject arises. The name on George Washington International belongs to a man dead more than two centuries who is party to no living argument, and it has never been questioned once. The names Parliament chose for this field belonged to people about whom the capital had opinions, and it declined to say them.

Superseded

The problem of 1958

By the late 1950s the difficulty was no longer traffic but aircraft. Columbia Regional had been laid out for propeller machines on a site that could not be enlarged. Its longest runway was under seven thousand feet, and it ended at water on one side and at the city on the other. The jets entering service required more, and there was no possibility of providing it.

The consequence was not commercial but diplomatic. A foreign minister flying to the capital of the United Kingdom of America would shortly have to land somewhere else and drive, at the exact moment the jet was making intercontinental travel a routine instrument of government.

The federal government therefore built a new airport twenty-five miles west, on farmland, at a scale the traffic did not justify, and opened it in 1962.

The decision not to close

The plan had always assumed that Columbia Regional would then close. The airport was small, awkward, expensive to maintain on subsiding fill, and its site would be worth something to somebody. The new field could take everything.

Closure was proposed formally in 1962 and got nowhere at all. The reasons given at the time were the reasons given since: the war-built infrastructure was sound, the capital would want a short-haul field, the new airport was too far out for a day trip, and the money spent on the fill would be wasted. The reason that mattered was not given, and did not need to be. The people who would have had to close it were the people who used it.

The Realm has never much pretended otherwise. The official histories of the decision are unusually candid about it, and the standing description of Columbia Regional in the capital is that it is the only piece of infrastructure in the Realm whose users write its legislation.

Restriction in place of closure

What the government did instead was to keep the airport and remove its capacity to grow. The restrictions imposed between 1962 and the late 1960s were framed as protections for the new airport’s viability, and that was a real concern: a large airport twenty-five miles out cannot compete with a small one fifteen minutes away, and if Columbia Regional had been left unrestricted it would have taken the traffic that justified building George Washington International in the first place.

The result is an airport that is deliberately prevented from being as useful as it could be, by a body that uses it, in order to protect an airport that body uses less. It is a stable arrangement and it has held for sixty years.

The perimeter rule

What it is

The perimeter rule is a statutory limit on how far an aircraft may fly non-stop from Columbia Regional. It applies to scheduled services, it is expressed as a great-circle distance from the field, and a flight that would exceed it may not be operated whatever the aircraft is capable of.

Nothing about it is technical. A modern narrow-body can fly across the continent from the runway available, and does so from fields with worse. The rule exists to stop the close-in airport competing for the long-haul traffic that pays for the far one, and this has never been concealed.

The distance, and how it has moved

It was set at 650 miles when it was introduced in the middle 1960s, which reached the nearer polity capitals and very little else. It was raised to 1,000 miles in the 1980s, and to 1,250 miles, where it stands, in the decade after that.

Each increase was fought at length, each was carried by members whose constituencies lay just outside the previous figure, and each was opposed by the airports authority, by the carriers established at the other airport, and by the Province of Virginia. The pattern is so consistent that the capital can generally predict which members will speak in any given round by looking at a map and a ruler.

Exemptions

A number of beyond-perimeter exemptions exist, granted by statute in discrete rounds, each round consisting of a small number of slots allowed to fly further than the rule permits. They are allocated by the independent slot coordinator against criteria the statute sets, and they are among the most bitterly contested pieces of administrative allocation in the Realm.

The objection to them is not that the destinations are undeserving. It is that an exemption is a permanent competitive advantage handed out by a process a carrier can lobby, and the carriers understand this perfectly. Every round produces a fresh set of arguments about whether the west of the Realm is being kept out of its own capital, and every round is settled by a compromise that satisfies nobody and is described as final.

The recurring proposal

Every few years a member proposes abolishing the perimeter rule outright. The member’s constituency is generally just beyond the current figure. The airports authority explains why not, at length, in the same terms it used the last time. The proposal fails and returns.

The argument against abolition is genuinely strong and is not merely protective. The airport’s capacity is fixed by the movements cap, not by the perimeter, so removing the perimeter would not add a single flight. It would convert short flights into long ones, which means fewer destinations served from the capital and better-connected places taking the slots from worse-connected ones. The polities that campaign hardest for abolition would in most models lose service.

This has been demonstrated repeatedly and persuades nobody, because the case for abolition has never really been about aggregate service.

The movements cap

Slots

Columbia Regional is a slot-controlled airport, and the arrangement is a standard illustration of how the Realm divides aviation powers among bodies that do not answer to one another.

The Civil Aviation Authority of America determines the airport’s declared capacity, which stands at roughly sixty movements an hour and has been substantially unchanged for decades, together with any immediate operational restriction. An independent coordinator allocates the routine slots, under transport, competition, passenger, environmental and minimum-service law rather than at the airport’s convenience. The airports authority operates the field and allocates nothing. Controllers retain authority over the actual sequence on any given day, and an allocated slot has never purchased live operational priority.

The consequence is that no single body can be lobbied into enlarging Columbia Regional. The capacity, the allocation and the day’s sequence sit in three different pairs of hands, and a member of Parliament who wants more flights out of the capital must persuade all of them.

The cap is the airport’s real constraint and the perimeter rule is secondary to it. It limits noise, it limits road and rail congestion at a site with one causeway, and it limits the airport’s ability to grow into the traffic it could take.

The curfew

A night curfew prohibits scheduled movements between ten at night and seven in the morning, with narrow exceptions for delayed arrivals, medical flights and the Crown’s aircraft. It is enforced by fines that are large enough to be worth avoiding, and the schedules are built around it: the last departures of the evening leave with a visible margin, and a carrier that misses the window sends its aircraft to the other airport.

What a slot is worth

A great deal. A permission to operate at a capacity-constrained field fifteen minutes from a legislature is among the most valuable things in the Realm’s aviation, and the difficulty is that a carrier holding one cannot simply realise the value.

Use and transfer rules prevent a slot from being treated as freehold property. Transfers happen, but they are conditional, reviewable and made against the same public criteria as an original allocation, and a slot that is not used is a slot that goes back. The Realm settled this deliberately: an operating permission granted by the public for public reasons does not become an asset on a balance sheet merely because it has been held for a long time.

What this produces is not a cash market but a pattern of behaviour. Carriers protect holdings they no longer need by flying them, which at Columbia Regional means a small number of aircraft leaving the capital in the early evening with very few people aboard, at an airport where the waiting list for a slot is long. The coordinator’s minimum-use rules exist to stop exactly this and are argued about continuously, because the line between a route that is genuinely developing and a route that exists to hold a permission is a matter of judgement and the judgement is worth a lot of money.

Proposals to auction slots outright, or to charge for them, are made by a committee every few years. They are resisted by the carriers, and they run into a real objection as well as a self-interested one: an auction allocates by ability to pay, and the statute the coordinator works under requires it to weigh minimum service to places that cannot outbid anyone.

The runways and the aircraft

The runways

The main runway runs roughly north to south along the river, is a little under seven thousand feet, and has water at both ends. Two shorter runways cross it and are used in particular wind conditions by smaller aircraft.

Nothing may be lengthened. The main runway ends at the water because the ground ends at the water, and the ground ends at the water because that is where the fill stopped in 1940.

What can use it

The airport takes single-aisle jets and turboprops and nothing larger. The restriction is not formally on aircraft size but follows from the runway length, the pavement, the taxiway geometry and the stand dimensions, and it is absolute in practice. A wide-body aircraft has landed at Columbia Regional only in exceptional circumstances and does not do so in scheduled service.

The consequence is a fleet of remarkable uniformity. An observer at the fence sees essentially one class of aeroplane arriving and departing all day, which makes the airport unusually legible and unusually monotonous.

The approach

The river

Aircraft arriving from the south follow the Potomac. The approach traces the river’s bends by sight, holding over the water and turning with it, rather than descending on a straight line from twenty miles out as an airport with room around it would allow.

The reason is noise and the reason is also the capital. The city’s monumental core lies to the east of the river and its airspace is restricted, and the approach exists to keep aircraft over water and away from both.

What a passenger sees

The result is one of the celebrated arrivals in the Realm. An aircraft on the river approach passes the length of the capital at low altitude on a curving path, and because the city is subject to a statutory height limit, nothing stands between the window and the plan. The whole of New Westminster is visible at once and in order: the bridges, the Charter Axis running east and west, Parliament House at one end of it, and Columbia Palace closing the western end and facing back down the length of the city.

Passengers who have made the flight many times still look. The seats on the appropriate side are known to frequent travellers and are chosen deliberately. The view is the single thing about Columbia Regional that appears in general writing about the capital.

The demands on the crew

It is a demanding arrival and is treated as one. The approach is flown visually, in a river valley, on a curving track, to a short runway with water beyond it, frequently in wind that the surrounding terrain makes unpredictable. It requires the aircraft to be positioned accurately at low altitude with limited room to correct, and it is not available in poor visibility, when arrivals use a straight-in procedure that is easier to fly and considerably noisier.

Carriers restrict the approach to crews trained specifically for it. The training exists because the margins are thin and the consequences of leaving the corridor are not merely operational: the restricted airspace over the capital is defended, and an aircraft that strays from the river is intercepted.

Noise

The river is the noise abatement, and it works better than most. Aircraft are over water for the great majority of the arrival and departure, and the neighbourhoods along both banks are exposed to considerably less than their distance from a runway would suggest.

They are not exposed to nothing, and the residents’ associations along the northern bank are old, organised and well briefed. Their case has never been that the airport should close. It is that the curfew should be enforced more strictly, that the straight-in procedure used in poor weather should be used less, and that the airports authority’s noise monitoring should be published rather than summarised. The airports authority concedes the third of these at intervals and resists the other two.

The accident of 1982

The flight

On a snowy afternoon in January 1982, a scheduled service of Tidewater Air Lines, a small east-coast carrier, took off from the main runway and failed to climb.

The aircraft had waited a long time in heavy snow for a departure slot. It had been de-iced and had then waited again, which undid the de-icing. Its crew, unfamiliar with winter operation of the type, left an anti-icing system switched off, which caused the engine instruments to over-read, which caused them to set less power than they believed they had set. The aeroplane left the runway slowly, in a nose-high attitude, with ice on the wings and less thrust than it needed.

The bridge

It struck the road bridge downstream of the airport, took the tops off vehicles crossing it in the evening traffic, and went into the river, which was frozen.

Everyone aboard was killed except a small number who reached the surface through the broken ice, and several people on the bridge were killed in their cars.

The river

The rescue was made by helicopter crews working over ice too thin to stand on, in falling snow, close to the water, with a line lowered to survivors who could not hold it for long in that temperature. It was watched live by the capital, because the accident happened four miles from every television studio in the Realm.

Two acts from that afternoon are remembered. A passenger in the water passed the rescue line to others each time it was lowered to him, five times, and was gone when the helicopter returned for him. A man watching from the bank took off his coat and went into the river after a survivor who had lost her grip. The first was decorated posthumously and the second in person, and neither is named on the memorial at the airport, at the request of the first man’s family, who asked that all of the dead be listed together and none of them singled out.

The findings

The accident was investigated by the Air Accident Investigation Board, which is independent of the Civil Aviation Authority of America by the same 1956 statute that created both. The separation mattered here, because the report found against the regulator.

The crew’s errors were real and were listed. But the Board went further, and the passages that mattered were about the system that had put them there. The carrier had expanded rapidly into a market it did not understand, was operating in winter conditions its crews had not been trained for, and had a culture in which a delayed departure was treated as a failure. The Authority had approved the operation, had received previous reports of the same instrument behaviour on the same type, and had issued no airworthiness directive. The airport had a de-icing arrangement designed for occasional use and overwhelmed by a heavy snowfall.

None of this could have been written by a body inside the regulator, which is the reason the Board sits outside it. Its recommendations were formally non-binding, as the Board’s recommendations always are, and the Authority had to answer them publicly within a fixed period and did.

The changes that followed altered de-icing practice, holdover-time rules and cold-weather training across the Realm’s aviation, and are generally reckoned to have saved a considerable number of lives since. The Board’s refusal to let the crew’s errors stand as the whole explanation was not a departure but an application of the doctrine it was founded on: the Grand Canyon report of 1957, its first, had declined in the same way to pretend that one final action explained the system in which that action occurred.

Afterwards

Tidewater Air Lines did not survive the accident. It lost its bookings within months and was wound up inside two years, which is the ordinary fate of a small carrier after a public disaster.

A memorial stands at the airport, on the river side, facing downstream toward the bridge. It carries all of the names in one list, without rank, without distinction between those aboard and those on the bridge, and without the two decorations. The bridge itself was repaired and was not renamed.

The terminals

The 1941 hall

The original terminal is a long, low, curved building of the period, faced in limestone, with a row of tall arched windows along the river front and a concourse behind them that runs the length of it. It is a competent and rather handsome building of a kind the Realm built a good deal of in the years around 1940, and it was designed for a traffic level about a twentieth of what passes through the airport now.

Its river front is one of the pleasanter interiors in the capital: a very long room, full of daylight, with the airfield and the water beyond the glass.

Protection

The 1941 hall is protected. The rest of the airport is not.

The protection covers the original building’s exterior, its concourse and its principal interior finishes, and it constrains what can be done with them. It does not cover the piers, the later terminal, the hangars or the airfield works, which have been rebuilt and extended repeatedly.

The arrangement is generally regarded as having worked. The airport got a modern terminal, the capital kept the building it valued, and the two are visibly of different centuries and are not pretending otherwise.

The later terminal

The second terminal, opened in the 1990s alongside the first, handles most of the traffic. It is a long hall on a curve, in a series of vaulted bays with clerestory glazing, and it was designed for a site that is narrow, short of ground and hemmed by water on three sides.

It is well regarded without being celebrated. It is not the building the other airport has, and the airport authority has never suggested it is. What it does have is a great deal of daylight, a straightforward plan, and the shortest distance between a taxi and an aircraft seat of any comparable field in the Realm.

Access

The underground

Columbia Regional has its own station on the capital’s underground railway, in the terminal, at the end of the concourse. The journey to the centre takes about fifteen minutes and the journey to Parliament House takes about the same.

This is the airport’s decisive advantage and is worth stating plainly: a member of Parliament can leave the chamber and be at the gate inside half an hour, on foot and by train, without a car. Nothing else in the capital’s transport arrangements comes close, and no restriction Parliament has imposed on the airport has ever touched it.

Road

Road access is a single causeway from the Virginia bank and a bridge from the city, both of which are congested at the times the airport is busiest. The airport has less parking than a field of its traffic would normally have, because there is nowhere to put any more, and it is one of the few airports in the Realm where most passengers do not arrive by car.

Traffic

The network

The airport serves the polity capitals, the eastern and midwestern cities, and as much of the rest of the Realm as the perimeter reaches. Its network is dense, frequent and short, and it is dominated by American Airlines, whose interior network is built for exactly this kind of flying, with substantial operations by Delta and the smaller carriers.

Pan American is barely present, having almost no domestic route structure of the sort the perimeter permits, and the low-fare traffic is at Baltimore-Chesapeake, which is cheaper and much harder to reach.

The passengers

About twenty-five million a year, which is a great many for a field this size and is a direct consequence of the cap being on movements rather than on people. The only way to carry more passengers through a fixed number of slots is to fly a larger aeroplane through each one, so the carriers have done exactly that, and the airport now handles about the same number of aircraft as it did decades ago and roughly twice the number of passengers.

The passenger mix is unlike any other airport in the Realm. It is overwhelmingly business and government travel on weekdays, it collapses in August when Parliament rises, and it is quiet at weekends except on Sunday evenings and Monday mornings, when it is not.

Official flying

The Crown’s aircraft

The Royal American Air Force maintains the transport flight that carries the Sovereign when in the Realm, the Governor-General and the Prime Minister, and it operates from a discreet apron on the eastern side of the airfield, behind the hangars, out of sight of the terminals.

Its presence here rather than at the larger airport is a matter of proximity and is one of the practical reasons Columbia Regional was never going to close. A Governor-General leaving Government House for a polity capital is airborne in about twenty minutes. The arrangement is not ceremonial: departures from the eastern apron are not public events, there is no arrangement for spectators, and the aircraft taxi out among the scheduled traffic like anything else.

Long-haul state travel goes from George Washington International, which has the runway for it and the arrangements for a state departure that this field cannot provide.

Members of Parliament

The Realm makes no secret of the fact that this airport exists in its present form because members of Parliament use it, and the capital does not pretend to find this shocking. The candid defence, which is made openly in debate, is that a federation of continental size requires its legislators to go home, that going home should not consume two days a week, and that an airport near the chamber is a piece of the constitution’s plumbing.

The candid objection, which is also made openly, is that this is a perfectly good argument for the airport and no argument at all for the way its restrictions are set, which happen to suit the constituencies of the people who set them.

Governance

The airports authority

Both federal airports are operated by a statutory airports authority which is answerable to no single government and is deliberately insulated from the District, the provinces and the departments. It holds both fields together, which is central to how they are run: its obligations run to the capital’s aviation as a whole, and it is therefore the body that argues hardest against relaxing the restrictions on the airport it also operates.

The District’s seat

The Columbia District holds one seat on the airports authority’s board. It is a voice and not a veto, and the distinction matters and is regularly misstated.

The District cannot direct the airports authority, cannot alter the cap, cannot set the perimeter and cannot compel a change to the curfew. What it can do is sit in the room, receive the papers, put its objections on the record and require them to be answered. The seat was won after a long campaign and is regarded in the District as worth having and as considerably less than the District should have, both of which are defensible.

Virginia and Maryland hold seats on the same terms and make the same complaint about them.

Openness

May Day

On 1 May 2006, when four coordinated attacks struck the Province of New York and one of them struck an airport, Columbia Regional was grounded.

Everything on the airfield stopped and nothing departed. The decision was taken quickly and without much argument, because nobody yet knew what the pattern was, and a field four miles from Parliament House, from Government House and from Columbia Palace, in a Realm whose air had just been attacked, was the obvious thing to stop. Departures were held, arrivals were sent to the other airport or to Baltimore, and several thousand people spent the day in a terminal watching the same coverage as everyone else.

It reopened within days.

The settlement

What is more notable is what did not follow. The security settlement built after May Day is a background settlement: it is conducted through screening, records and signals that a passenger does not see, and it was deliberately not built into the concourse.

This airport, of all the Realm’s airports, is where a visible settlement would have been easiest to justify. It sits under the seat of government, its approach passes the Palace and the Parliament, and an aircraft leaving its runway is over the capital in ninety seconds. Every argument for barriers, exclusions, cordons and closed concourses applies here more strongly than anywhere else in the Realm, and was made after 2006 by people who meant it seriously.

The Realm declined. The reasoning, set out in the review that followed and repeated since, was that a capital which fortifies its own airport against its own citizens has conceded something the attack could not otherwise have taken, and that the security actually gained would be small compared to the security already being obtained invisibly.

Meeting at the gate

The consequence is visible on any weekday. A person without a ticket can walk into Columbia Regional, go through screening as a visitor, and stand at the gate when the aircraft doors open. Families meet arriving passengers where they arrive. Children are brought to watch aeroplanes from the concourse windows.

For a field of its size the openness is more conspicuous than at the larger airport, because everything at Columbia Regional is close together. The greeting area and the gate are the same room. A traveller walking off an aircraft is among people meeting other people within about forty feet, which is what the terminal was designed for in 1941 and what the later one was designed to preserve.

The land

The airport occupies several hundred acres of level ground four miles from the centre of a capital where the supply of building floor is fixed by statute and rents are among the highest in the Realm. In most cities this would make it the most contested development site in the country.

Nobody seriously proposes building on it. The reasons given are practical and are sound as far as they go: it is made ground, it is low, it is in the flood plain, it would require the fill to be worked over before anything heavy stood on it, and the capital’s height limit means that housing there would be low-rise and would not house very many people.

The reason that is not usually given is the same one that has answered every proposal about this airport since 1962. The people who would have to approve building on it are the people who fly from it.

Timeline

1937 to 1938. The flats below the city are proposed and adopted as an airport site, on the ground that they belong to nobody because they are river.

1938 to 1941. The channel is dredged and the spoil pumped onto the flats behind a revetment. The Abingdon ruin is enclosed within the fence.

June 1941. The airport opens as Georgetown Airpark.

December 1941. Requisitioned on the Realm’s entry into the Second Great War. Most of the airport’s present infrastructure is laid during the war.

1946. Returned to civil use and full within four years.

1948. Renamed Columbia Regional Airport. The code GTN is not changed.

Early 1940s. Virginia’s claim to the site is rejected on the ground that the retrocession returned land and the airport is made from river bed.

1958. The capital’s aviation problem is recognised as insoluble on this site. The runways cannot be lengthened.

1962. George Washington International opens. Closure of Columbia Regional is proposed and fails.

Middle 1960s. The perimeter rule is introduced at 650 miles. The movements cap and curfew follow.

1980s. The perimeter is raised to 1,000 miles. It later reaches 1,250, where it stands.

January 1982. A Tidewater Air Lines aircraft strikes the road bridge on take-off in snow and enters the frozen river. The findings change cold-weather practice across the Realm’s aviation.

1990s. The second terminal opens. The 1941 hall is protected. The Abingdon marker is rewritten to state who worked the estate.

1 May 2006. The airport is grounded on the day of the May Day Bombings, and reopens within days substantially as it was.

Twice, in statute. Parliament attaches a politician’s name to the airport. Twice the capital declines to use it.

Trivia

See also

• George Washington International Airport: the capital’s principal airport, twenty-five miles west in Virginia
• New Westminster: the capital city
• Columbia District: the federal district
• Columbia Palace: the Crown’s house in the capital, visible from the river approach
• Civil Aviation Authority of America: the safety regulator, and the independent Board that investigated the 1982 accident
• The May Day Bombings of 2006: the attacks that shaped the Realm’s security settlement