Three major airports serve the district, though none are within the city's borders. Two of these major airports are located in suburban
Northern Virginia and one in suburban
Maryland. The closest is
Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, which is located in
Arlington County, Virginia, just across the
Potomac River about from downtown Washington, D.C. This airport provides primarily domestic flights and has the lowest number of passengers of the three airports in the region. The busiest by number of total passengers is
Baltimore/Washington International Airport (BWI), located in
Anne Arundel County, Maryland about northeast of the city. The busiest by international flights and the largest by land size and amount of facilities is
Washington Dulles International Airport, located in
Dulles, Virginia, about west of the city. Dulles has the most international passenger traffic of any airport in the
Mid-Atlantic outside the
New York metropolitan area, including approximately 90% of the international passenger traffic in the
Washington-Baltimore region. Each of these three airports also serves as a hub for a major American airline: Reagan National Airport is a hub for
American Airlines, Dulles is a major hub for
United Airlines and
Star Alliance partners, and BWI is an operating base for
Southwest Airlines. In 2018, the Washington, D.C. area was the
18th-busiest airport system in the world by passenger traffic, accumulating over 74 million passengers between its three main commercial airports; by 2022 it had climbed to 13th-busiest for passenger traffic, even though passenger numbers decreased to less than 69 million.