From the states, passengers can take off from Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Travelers wanting to fly nonstop between the D.C. area and San Francisco must currently trek out to Dulles. But that’s changing in May when United introduces the first nonstop flight between Reagan and SFO.

Southwest Airlines will purchase fellow low-cost carrier AirTran for a tidy $1.42 billion plus AirTrans’s sizable debt, according to a report by the Associated Press. Southwest, which is already the country’s largest air carrier based on number of passengers, is making the move primarily to compete with Delta in Atlanta (the one major section of the country where Southwest currently doesn’t fly), but the merger will definitely create some waves in the Washington, D.C. area.

JetBlue this week announced that its new flights out of National Airport, which are expected to begin in November, will service just three cities: Boston, Orlando and Ft. Lauderdale. It’s good news for those of you who travel to Boston or Florida frequently, but to be honest, we had kinda been hoping for more. In a press release, the airline offered a sneak peek at its flight schedule out of DCA, which includes seven…

JetBlue announced today that it will start serving National Airport later this year. The airline already serves the D.C. area’s other two airports, BWI and Dulles. Starting in November, JetBlue plans to offer at least eight daily departures from DCA to select East Coast destinations. No word yet on what those routes will be, but White Plains, JFK, Boston, Syracuse, Buffalo, Burlington and Portland, ME are all likely candidates. JetBlue’s access to National Airport…

The Post updates with word that all the negative press from this morning’s stories about the nine Muslim passengers who were booted off of an AirTran flight on Thursday has provoked an apology from the airline. The passengers were removed from a flight heading from National Airport to Orlando.”We regret that the issue escalated to the heightened security level it did on New Year’s Day, but we trust everyone understands that the security and…

If you’re headed out to the airport, be sure to check your flight status. A “communications breakdown” at the Federal Aviation Administration is causing delays at nearly every single major airport in the country right now. WTOP helps us out with some specifics: flights out of BWI are grounded this afternoon, Reagan National is experiencing delays, while Dulles still seems to be humming along just fine. Although the FAA says their computers are having problems…