Qualla: Raleigh–Durham International Airport

Raleigh–Durham International Airport: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit renowiggum from Reno, USA, CC BY 2.0. The runways you fly into RDU on today are not the original runways. The original three are still there, off to the southeast - 4,500-foot strips that were laid down in 1943 for the U.S. Army Air Forces and are now mostly used as taxiways and remembered ground. From the air on approach to runway 5L/23R you can see them clearly, three short scars in the grass running at odd angles, the bones of a wartime airfield grown over by a fifteen-million-passenger international airport. RDU - Raleigh-Durham International - was born in the war, nearly didn't survive deregulation, and then grew up into a regional aviation power partly because the Research Triangle wouldn't stop expanding around it.

Image: renowiggum from Reno, USA | CC BY 2.0

Raleigh–Durham International Airport: From Army Barracks to Terminal A

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brisam, CC BY-SA 3.0. After the war, civilian airlines moved in. Capital Airlines joined Eastern at RDU; Piedmont Airlines arrived in 1948. The original Terminal 1 building was constructed in 1955, repurposed from temporary structures that had served as Army barracks. In April 1957 the Official Airlin...

Image: Brisam | CC BY-SA 3.0

Raleigh–Durham International Airport: The American Hub That Wasn't

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit (User:Wgreaves), CC BY 3.0. After airline deregulation in 1978, RDU caught a wave it didn't expect. American Airlines built a hub here through the 1980s, and at the peak in December 1992 was running 211 daily departures to 64 destinations - mostly eastern U.S., with AA hubs at Dallas/Fort Worth and Chicago-...

Image: (User:Wgreaves) | CC BY 3.0

Raleigh–Durham International Airport: The Tech Boom Helps

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ildar Sagdejev (Specious), CC BY-SA 4.0. What saved RDU - and eventually turned it into one of the fastest-growing mid-size airports in America - was the Research Triangle around it. By the 2010s, IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco, the NIEHS, and hundreds of biotech and software companies were within a fifteen-minute drive. T...

Image: Ildar Sagdejev (Specious) | CC BY-SA 4.0

Raleigh–Durham International Airport: The Long Memory of an Airfield

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lee Coursey, CC BY 2.0. Three runways serve RDU today: 5L/23R north of the terminals, 5R/23L and 14/32 south. A new 10,639-foot 5L/23R is currently under construction north of the existing one, with paving scheduled for 2027 and completion in 2029. The Vision 2040 Master Plan calls for Terminal 1 expans...

Image: Lee Coursey | CC BY 2.0