There is terrible news for those of you who really enjoy getting off a long, cramped flight and then boarding an excruciatingly slow, cramped, nausea-inducing bus — sorry, “mobile lounge” — just to escape Dulles International Airport in the Virginia suburbs of Washington.
The bus part may be going away.
On Wednesday, President Trump announced plans for a $22.5 billion redesign of Dulles, including a new hotel and an air train and central walking tunnel connecting the terminals. But the part that has received the most attention is a call to phase out the shuttles that ferry customers between the main terminal and the concourses.
For those of us who look forward to torture, the loss of the mobile lounges is a blow to our desire for sadness.
“Sometimes you will see a vehicle so unique it stops you in your tracks as your mind searches for an absent frame of reference,” the British comedian Troy Hawke said in an email. “I had this unique ‘people mover’ experience myself last year, and I for one am devastated by the removal of these flat-nose, steampunk-adjacent trundlers.”
For many, this is a cause for celebration. As Mr. Trump put it to reporters this week: “It’s an impossible airport: You go off a bus, you get into a train. You get off of a train, you get into another bus.”
The shuttles are unique to Dulles and their removal would significantly change the airport experience. Here, we will try to answer some of your burning questions about the buses.
The mobile lounges are a relic of the jet age.
The mobile lounges have existed since the airport opened in 1962. Back then, Dulles was considered a cutting-edge airport, designed by the Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen to adapt to the increasing size of jets and to limit how far passengers had to walk to board their flights.
Saarinen’s solution was a terminal where passengers would walk just a couple hundred feet from the ticket counter to a “mobile lounge,” which would then carry them directly to the plane’s door.
“In 1962, this was revolutionary,” Patrick Penfield, a professor of supply chain practice at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, said in an email. “Other airports experimented with similar people-mover systems but they quickly abandoned them due to the machines’ inefficiencies.”
A 1958 promotional video, produced by the husband-and-wife design team of Charles and Ray Eames, made the case for reducing walking at airports in a cartoon.
“The grand total of walking done by passengers inside the 10 major airports in 1958 would equal 100 trips across the country plus 20 walks around the world plus 4½ round-trip treks to the moon,” a narrator says in the video.
“What is now required,” the narrator says, “is that some part of the terminal building be able to detach itself and move out to the aircraft. It would seem that this might best be the departure lounge itself.”
Their argument was that mobile lounges would allow airports to use their land more efficiently — less space for buildings would allow for more flexibility on where they could land or be stationed.
Was one ever the setting of an international incident?
An oddly specific question. And yes.
In 1984, the Soviet Union accused the United States of impeding a mathematician named Sergei Kozlov from boarding his plane at Dulles.
Mr. Kozlov, who had been visiting the United States for months, informed the police in Pasadena, Calif., that he thought someone was trying to use gas to poison him in his hotel room, and that he believed he was being followed by the K.G.B. After a stint lecturing at the California Institute of Technology, he flew to Dulles for a connecting flight to Moscow.
U.S. officials met him there to, from their telling, check if he was heading back to Russia voluntarily. Mr. Kozlov, who was accompanied by Soviet diplomats, insisted that he wanted to go back to Russia.
On the way to the plane — in a mobile lounge — Mr. Kozlov had a change of heart and declined to board. The Soviet diplomats were furious, insisting that the American government was not allowing Mr. Kozlov to leave. Tass, the official Soviet press agency, said Mr. Kozlov was a “sick person.” U.S. officials countered by saying that if they wanted to detain Mr. Kozlov, they would not have let him get on the mobile lounge
When he returned to the airport, Mr. Kozlov requested that the files that the K.G.B. and the C.I.A. held on him be burned in his presence. When that was not done, he said he wanted to consider his next move.
In the meantime, multiple scholarly exchanges between the United States and Russia were suspended in the wake of this diplomatic row. Weeks later, Mr. Kozlov headed home.
The mobile lounges have been involved in several accidents.
On Nov. 10, 2025, a mobile lounge crashed as it was carrying passengers to the terminal from Concourse D, injuring more than a dozen people and causing some damage to the terminal building. Passengers exited the mobile lounge using the stairs, and 18 people were taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening, an airport spokeswoman said at the time.
A 2017 investigation by NBC4 Washington found that the mobile lounges had been involved in at least 16 accidents since 2007, including one fatal accident and others that caused injuries.
Why are travelers so eager to get rid of them?
Some passengers love experiencing an anachronistic vestige of space-age airport design.
But others, like Tim Kardashian, a Washington-based comedian, feel differently.
“They’re terrible,” Mr. Kardashian, the host of a live comedy show called “The Washington Roast,” said in an interview. “It seems that you’re always waiting for them. And then they take forever to get moving. It just seems like so outdated compared to what you get at other airports.”
Being in one, he said, is a “turbulent” experience.
“You’re bumping around,” Mr. Kardashian said. “You’re moving around. It’s not a comfortable experience at all. I avoid Dulles Airport for this reason. That and the traffic to get there. But it’s the worst part about flying into Dulles.”
They’re a source of inefficiency too, according to Professor Penfield of Syracuse University.
“Dulles is the only airport in the U.S. still using people movers — machines that no longer have manufacturer support, burn roughly 260,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year and have long been a source of flight delays and frustration of passengers,” Mr. Penfield said.
Put another way, Professor Penfield said, “They are basically retiring the airport equivalent of a fax machine.”
“Everyone complained about it for 60 years,” he added, “but there is going to be a small, weird contingent of aviation nerds genuinely mourning the ‘moon buggy’ experience once it’s gone.”
