The decision to abandon a new international airport near Nantes has been hailed by passenger groups as common sense for a country which already has more than 80 commercial airports, the most of any EU country.
Fnaut, a national federation representing 150 passenger associations, says it is time to consider whether there are too many regional airports in France, weighing on the taxpayer and damaging the environment.
It comes as Ryanair announced plans to double its capacity in France over four years to around 20million passengers a year. It hopes to open one or two bases in the next 18 months and ultimately up to five – however, details of where have not yet been released.
Plans for a new airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, 30km north-west of Nantes, had been in the pipeline for over 50 years, until the decision by Prime Minister Edouard Philippe that the project was cancelled and the land would be returned to agricultural use. Instead, Nantes Atlantique airport will be modernised and its runway extended and more use will be made of Rennes.
Passenger numbers at many airports have boomed – including at Nantes, which last year had 5.5million; 700,000 more than in 2016.
Fnaut vice-president Jean Sivardière said: “We should not be encouraging air transport, it’s better to develop the train network as an alternative to short-haul flights.
“Politicians were deluding themselves that there would have been flights to places like New York and Hong Kong from Notre-Dame-des-Landes. The west is too under-populated.
“It’s better to improve links with the Paris airports which are a couple of hours away.”
He added that France should remove local authority subsidies for airports and tax kerosene in the same way as petrol to make it more attractive to take the train. Many regions also have too many airports, including Normandy, the west and Provence.
“In Normandy there are airports in Deauville, Caen, Le Havre and Rouen – we don’t need all these. They cost the taxpayer and pollute,” he added.
The president of BAR France, representing airlines serving French airports, Jean-Pierre Sauvage, said the decision to develop Nantes Atlantique instead of building Notre-Dame-des-Landes would mean more noise for residents who live under the flight paths and potential planning complications for extending the terminal which is “saturated” one day out of three.
However he agreed that questions should be asked as to whether all France’s small airports are necessary.
He said there are 84 commercial airports in metropolitan France. “There are 16 with more than a million passengers a year, which represent 95% of the air transport business. And of the rest, 44 represent 0.5%.”
He added in some cases nearby towns each have an airport, such as Bergerac and Périgueux, Castres and Toulouse or Pau and Lourdes: “In the Mediterranean you have Perpignan, Béziers, Montpellier and Nîmes half an hour from each other.
“Everyone wants their own little airport, never mind if it’s rational.”
Mr Sauvage said small airports take money from large ones via a tax paid by passengers which subsidises the small ones’ safety and security costs.
The leader of the Union des Aéroports de France (UAF), Nicolas Paulissen, estimates the true number of commercial airports to be over 100 but said only 57 have more than 10,000 passengers a year.
However he said the question was not the number of airports but whether they are all being put to the best use, as airports can have many uses apart from standard commercial flights.
Such strategic analysis is increasingly being carried out by regional councils, however he did not believe any should close.
“If we had decided 30 years ago that there were too many airports we would have closed a lot that today have plenty of passengers – Bergerac, for example, which today has 300,000 passengers,” he said.
Low-cost flights, the arrival of the British, and the construction of the EU has given a new life to regional airports like Bergerac, La Rochelle and Carcassonne, he said.
“If we followed Fnaut’s reasoning, we could have ended up with just the Paris ones.”
Mr Paulissen added the argument that rail is greener is questionable as the carbon footprint of the railways did not take into account factors like the emissions produced to get to the station and the origin of the electricity used by trains.
“It’s increasingly recognised that sometimes, for example, a new air route can be a better bet to link up an isolated area than a horribly expensive TGV line,” he said.
