The no-fly zone will extend over a radius of 150 kilometers around Paris, the civil aviation authority and Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said.
The sky above the Paris region will be closed for six hours as part of the massive security operation ahead of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on July 26, the operator of Paris airports announced on Wednesday.
Augustin de Romanet, president of Aéroports de Paris, said airlines are warned in advance of the closure and will have to bypass regulated airspace.
“For six hours, there will be no plane over the Paris region,” he declared on France Info.
The no-fly zone will extend over a radius of 150 kilometers around Paris, the civil aviation authority and Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said.
The unprecedented aquatic ceremony on the Seine River running through the French capital poses the toughest security challenge for Paris Games organizers, with crowds of more than 320,000 expected along the waterway.
At least one French AWACS military surveillance plane will monitor the skies during the Olympics, using its powerful radar to monitor any potential aerial threats, the commander of France’s AWACS squadron told The Associated Press. Other military aircraft may be dispatched to intercept any unauthorized flights entering restricted Olympic airspace.
Separately, de Romanet said there was still a “very, very high” chance that small electric airborne taxis would be tested with passengers over Paris from July 26 to August 26. 11 Games, which he said would be a world first.
But European aviation certification authorities could initially allow taxis to carry passengers only on an experimental, non-commercial basis, he added.
“We have high hopes of being able to experimentally transport passengers, which will pave the way, over Paris, for the world’s first flight of an electric vertical take-off aircraft,” he said.
Several companies are developing electric planes that take off and land vertically. Some have already carried out demonstration flights, in a race to turn their promises of environmentally friendly air travel into a commercially viable reality.
De Romanet insisted the plane was safe: “I am ready to board.”
Critics fear that taxis plying Paris’ skies are a noisy and potentially dangerous nuisance and affordable only to the wealthy. The socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is one of the opponents of the plan to experiment with them on a few lines in the Ile-de-France region during the Games.
