Andrews: America's Airfield
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Maryland
Just southeast of Washington, in Prince George's County, sits the airfield that has become the front door of American power. Joint Base Andrews, known for generations as Andrews Air Force Base, is where the president of the United States departs and arrives, where foreign dignitaries first touch American soil, and where the most consequential flights in the nation's history have landed.
It began with a letter. On August twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-one, President Franklin Roosevelt wrote to his Secretary of War directing that the federal government acquire a tract of land in Camp Springs, Maryland, for a military airfield. Construction accelerated after Pearl Harbor. The base became operational in May of nineteen forty-three, when the first Republic P-Forty-Seven Thunderbolt arrived. Two years later, the facility was renamed Andrews Field, honoring Lieutenant General Frank Andrews, one of the architects of American airpower, who had died in a plane crash in Iceland.
Almost from its first days, Andrews was the home of what the Air Force calls Special Air Missions, the transport of senior government and military leaders. President Harry Truman became the first president to fly a presidential flight out of Andrews, on November twenty-fourth, nineteen forty-six. When John Kennedy moved his official aircraft permanently from Washington National in March nineteen sixty-two, Andrews formally became what it has been ever since, the Home of Air Force One.
The most searing moment in the base's history came without any ceremony. On the evening of November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three, Air Force One rolled to a stop on the Andrews tarmac carrying the body of President Kennedy, his widow Jacqueline in her bloodstained pink suit, and the newly sworn-in President Lyndon Johnson. The nation watched it on live television, the first time in history a president's death had been witnessed in real time.
Since that night, no departure from Andrews has been routine. The sight of the distinctive blue-and-white seven-four-seven lifting off from this airfield carries the weight of everything that has flown before it.
