Asturias56
Actually it's not mistranslated.
It's just that politicians themselves (at least here) don't understand airline economics.
So they made an amalgam between connecting flights and flights to CDG (which is the main hub, as you know), and local/domestic flights and flights to ORY (which is the secondary hub, with many connecting flights to french overseas territories)
So you can still book a ticket from Bordeaux to Paris provided you choose CDG. You can book a ticket from Bordeaux to La Réunion but if your long haul flights departs from Orly you will have to take a train to a city called Massy, 15 minutes away from Orly by cab, and make a self connection with a taxi or something.. I don't know if they're planning anything serious.
Only three destinations are concerned for Air France : Orly to Bordeaux, Lyon, and Nantes. Maybe there are some HOP lines affected as well, but Air France working hand in hand with the government I think will not mourn them, as they want to replace HOP with transavia, which is a true low cost; HOP is the regional subsidiary, it was made by joining 3 previous regional airlines, but instead of merging them, they added a fourth entity to manage the three previous ones. So they just piled up the costs.
Aviation faces many challenge as of now in France.
Some environmentalists and the left party (a bit more left than left but not so extreme) want to increase the limit to up to 4 hours or 4.5 hours by train. They say this would include Paris to Nice, but the shortest train travel is 5h50min so this proves that they really don't know what they're talking about. But it would include Toulouse and Marseille which are two huge domestic lines, as well as montpellier, maybe Brest
The mayor of a small city started a nationwide controversy after saying that children should forget their aviation dreams.
The mayor of another small city refused its airshow to continue.
They closed an airstrip (before covid) in the mountains that was very useful and had much mountain flying activity. They also want to limit mountain flying around the Mont Blanc due to noise pollution..
The mayor of Lyon refused the national aerobatics squadron to continue flying over their city for airshows.
Aerial advertising which had some presence over our beaches was made illegal.
... Who knows what's next ?
It's a bit worrying.
Originally Posted by
OldLurker
Surely the guide should be comparative travel times for real journeys.
For example, Paris to Nice. How long does it take, on average (not fastest achievable by racing) to get from Notre-Dame to Place Masséna by public transport (1) by TGV, (2) by air, including travel time to station/airport, check-in, security, sitting around waiting to board, boarding, gate-to-gate time of train or plane, getting out of station/airport, travel time to destination? I don't know, but I'd bet on the TGV winning.
This is not a good metric. There are 12 million people in Paris. Of which only 2 million, about 16%, live inside Paris center. Sort of the same situation in most cities (except Nice due to peculiar geography between sea and mountain)
For Nice it certainly does not make the TGV win, 5h40 to 6 hours vs 1h20 by plane, even if you add very generous times for boarding. You may add 3 hours to the airplane time and 1 hour to the train time, so this would make about 7h vs 4h20.
There is however a match for destinations like Marseille, 4 hours by TGV, 4 hours by plane. If you're a frequent flyer used to arriving late at the airport, and/or if you live closer to an airport than a station, plane wins, if you're closer to the station and/or are not used to flying, TGV wins.
In practise, the TGV wins over the airplane when the train time becomes lower than 2h30 approximately. Except at Bordeaux because there were a lot of companies with sites just close to Mérignac airport and just close to Orly airport. So for them BOD-ORY was perfect.
AF can compete with the TGV when there is at least 2h30 of train time, easyjet can do so when there is at least 4.5 hours of train time.