Airports aren’t a zero-sum game.
That’s how Avports CEO Marc Ricks sees it, anyway, and that’s why he thinks there’s room in the D.C. area for a new, fourth airport — in Manassas, Virginia — that can succeed without detracting from the region’s other sites.
“You are never going to catch your Middle Eastern flag carrier’s nonstop flight to the Gulf from Washington Manassas Airport,” Ricks told The Washington Post in an interview.
But Ricks said there’s an opportunity in Manassas to tap into the low-cost market. “You have the option to bring a product to the region that doesn’t really exist today,” he said.
Virginia-based Avports, which operates more than a dozen airports, is leading the years-long redevelopment of the Manassas site from a general-aviation airport to a commercial one.
On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration granted the recently renamed Washington Manassas Airport a Part 139 Airport Operating Certificate, which allows it to accommodate certain commercial passenger airlines. It’s the first airport in Virginia in 53 years to receive a new operating certificate, the FAA said. In the past decade, the FAA has granted operating certificates to just five other airports.
Manassas Vice Mayor Mark Wolfe estimates that thousands of hours have already gone into getting the airport ready to serve commercial passengers.
“It is a very large process, but it is a process that will have an extremely large payoff on the backside,” he said in an interview. “This creates jobs. It creates economic opportunities, and obviously for the city, it’s a huge branding coup.”
The airport is aiming to launch commercial services in November 2027. Ricks declined to say which airlines Avports is in talks with, but he said the first airline to fly out of Manassas is likely to be a low-cost carrier.
Years ago, airport director Juan Rivera said the budget airline Allegiant told him it would fly out of Manassas, but only if the airport paid for all the necessary infrastructure and “with really no guarantees that they would hang around.” An Allegiant spokesperson said it is constantly evaluating opportunities at airports around the United States but declined to comment on Manassas.
A mountain of work has gone into getting the airport ready for commercial operations, including arranging full-time firefighting and Transportation Security Administration-grade security, upgrading runways and taxiways to accommodate a Boeing 737-800 aircraft, and conducting a lengthy federal environment review, according to Rivera.
“It was a very long, complicated, arduous process,” Rivera said. The airport is also set to construct a new air traffic control tower over the next few years, he added.
Rivera, who has served as airport director for more than two decades, said the city council has wanted the airport to offer commercial flights for years, including when there was a proposal for a Disney site in Northern Virginia in the 1990s.
“We could have had Disney up here,” he said. “Now we have a bunch of houses and data centers.”
The airport’s commercialization, though, has been a long time coming, Rivera said. So when Avports came along, he was interested. “They’re willing enough to put the capital up that we didn’t have,” he said.
To explain why he thinks the Manassas airport will succeed, Ricks points to New York, where everyone knows the three main airports: LaGuardia, John F. Kennedy and Newark. But Ricks also cites Westchester County Airport, which Avports operates; Long Island MacArthur Airport; Atlantic City International Airport; and others.
“This is not a foreign concept of having bite-sized, accessible, convenient, affordable, small airports that play a role in a regional and national air system without being viewed as in competition with the mega hubs. It’s a different product,” Ricks said.
Still, operating costs are set to substantially rise at Dulles in the coming years, which Jonathon Freye, executive director of the Association of Value Airlines, said could drive some airlines to Manassas.
With Dulles set to undergo a years-long, multibillion-dollar renovation backed by President Donald Trump, the cost per enplanement at the airport — the average amount an airline pays an airport for each boarding passenger — is expected to skyrocket.
In 2025, that cost was $9.56, according to the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority’s financial report from that year. In August, MWAA CEO Jack Potter said that sum would rise to around $60 or $65 in the next 12 to 15 years.
Freye doesn’t think budget airlines will like that increase. “Our value carriers have demonstrated that there’s a really strong demand here for more affordable and competitive air service in this market,” he said.
Potter said those rising costs won’t be passed on to passengers, but Freye said he wasn’t so sure. “As a sector, the value carriers are left to wonder how that could possibly be the case with a project of this scope,” he said.
To Ricks, this town is big enough for four airports — in part because the Manassas airport isn’t trying to replace the other three.
Last year, Washington Dulles International Airport served more than 29 million passengers, a record, and Reagan National Airport served nearly 25 million, according to the MWAA. And more than 25 million passengers traveled through Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport last year.
The Manassas airport, meanwhile, is set to open with four gates, with plans to expand if the airport is as successful as the team expects, according to Ricks. At the airport’s maximum build-out, Ricks said, they are forecasting 1.5 million departing passengers per year.
“That’s in the noise for those airports. That would not replace them,” Ricks said. “We can be wildly successful by the standards of this airport, and they won’t notice us.”
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