PARIS– The skies over the Paris region will be closed for six hours as part of the massive security operation for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on July 26, the operator of Paris airports said Wednesday.
Augustin de Romanet, president of Aéroports de Paris, said airlines are being given advance notice of the closure and told they will have to fly in the restricted airspace.
“For six hours, there will be no aircraft flying over the Paris region,” he told France Info radio.
The no-fly zone will extend to a radius of 150 kilometers (93 miles) around Paris, the civil aviation authority and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said.
The unprecedented water ceremony on the River Seine, which runs through the French capital, is the toughest security challenge for Paris Games organizers, with crowds of more than 320,000 expected along the canal.
At least one French AWACS military surveillance aircraft will police the skies during the Olympics, using its powerful radar to watch for any potential aerial threats, the French AWACS squadron commander previously told the Associated Press. Other military aircraft may be sent to intercept any unauthorized flights entering restricted Olympic airspace.
Separately, de Romanet said there is still a “very, very high” probability that small, electrically powered air taxis will be tested with passengers over Paris during the July 26-August period. 11 Games, which he said would be a world first.
But European air certification authorities may initially allow taxis to carry passengers only on an experimental basis, and not commercially, he added.
“We have high hopes that we will be able to carry passengers experimentally, which will pave the way over Paris for the world’s first flight of an electric vertical takeoff aircraft,” he said.
Several companies are developing electrically powered aircraft that take off and land vertically. Some have already carried out demonstration flights, in a race to turn their promises of environmentally friendly air transport into a commercially viable reality.
De Romanet insisted the aircraft is safe, saying: “I am ready to board.”
Critics fear that taxis plying Paris’ airways are a noisy and potentially dangerous nuisance and accessible only to the wealthy. Socialist Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo is among those opposing proposals to test them on some routes in the Paris region during the Games.
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