04/24/24 09:37:00
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04/24 09:35 CDT Paris will become a no-fly zone to safeguard its wildly
ambitious Olympic opening ceremony
Paris will become a no-fly zone to safeguard its wildly ambitious Olympic
opening ceremony
PARIS (AP) --- Skies over the Paris region will be closed for six hours as part
of the massive security operation for the July 26 opening ceremony of the
Olympic Games, the Paris airports operator said Wednesday.
Augustin de Romanet, chairman of Aroports de Paris, said airlines are being
warned in advance about the closure and told they will have to fly around the
restricted airspace.
"For six hours, there won't be any aircraft over the Paris region," he said on
France Info radio.
The no-fly zone will extend for a radius of 150 kilometers (93 miles) around
Paris, the civil aviation authority and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin have
said.
The unprecedented waterborne ceremony on the River Seine running through the
French capital is the stiffest single security challenge for Paris Games
organizers, with crowds of more than 320,000 people expected to line the
waterway.
At least one French military AWACS surveillance aircraft will police the skies
during the Olympics, using its powerful radar to watch for any potential
airborne threats, the French AWACS squadron's commander previously told The
Associated Press. Other military aircraft can be scrambled to intercept any
non-authorized flights that enter restricted Olympic airspace.
Separately, de Romanet said there's still a "very, very high" probability that
small electric-powered airborne taxis will be trialled with passengers over
Paris during the July 26-Aug. 11 Games, which he said would be a world first.
But European air-certification authorities might initially only allow the taxis
to fly passengers on an experimental basis, 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 first flight in the world of an
electrical vertical take-off aircraft," he said.
Multiple companies are developing electrically powered aircraft that take off
and land vertically. Some have already flown demonstration flights, in a race
to turn their promises of environmentally friendly air transport into a
commercially viable reality.
De Romanet insisted that the aircraft are safe, saying: "I am ready to climb
aboard."
Critics worry that taxis zipping through the airs of Paris will be a noisy and
potentially dangerous nuisance and affordable only by the wealthy. The
Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is among opponents of proposals to
trial them on a few Paris-region routes during the Games.
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AP Olympics coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games
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