A Sample Feature From Aviation News

Toulouse-Blagnac

Above: The main terminal building at Toulouse-Blagnac, with two Airbus A318s moored, will be complemented from 2010 by the new Terminal Hall D. (Photos, Geoff Jones)

France’s sixth busiest airport, Toulouse-Blagnac (TLS/LFBO) is best known as the home of Airbus, and is the main port of entry to the Midi-Pyrénées region of southwest France. As such, it is the home to Europe’s commercial aircraft manufacturing aspiration. Geoff Jones went to look it over.

THE airport’s civil commercial operations are centred on the north-eastern perimeter of the two parallel runways (15R/33L and 15L/33R) and the huge Airbus facility, on the site of the former Aérospatiale works, are to the southwest. However, such is EADS/Airbus’s expansion that new facilities, such as the gargantuan Airbus A380 facility, have now encroached on to the north-eastern side of the airport. Further vast civil engineering works are also underway at Toulouse ready to accommodate Airbus A.350XWB production. Located just a 15min taxi ride to the west of the centre of the city of Toulouse, with its population of one million and named from the village of Blagnac which it has engulfed, it has been an important centre of aviation and aircraft production since before World War One. Many historic flights took place from here, including the May 27, 1955, maiden flight of the prototype Caravelle 01, the March 2, 1969, maiden flight of Concorde and the October 28, 1972, flight of the very first Airbus, the A300.

It was the design and development of Concorde at Toulouse that instigated the construction of the airport’s second runway (15R/33L), with the supersonic transport’s requirement for a 3,500m (11,483ft) runway. The airport’s more recent commercial growth has gone hand in hand with the growth of airliner production at the location and in 2007, passed a significant milestone when it handled in excess of 6 million passengers per annum for the first time – this has grown steadily since 1995 when 3.784 million passengers used Toulouse-Blagnac. March 23, 2007, also marked the transfer of Toulouse-Blagnac to a privately managed company, Société Aéroport Toulouse-Blagnac, with Jean-Michel Vernhes as its current President after fifty years under the control of the Toulouse Chamber of Commerce and Industry. It was the second French regional airport to be privatised, shortly after Aéroports de Lyon, both resulting from a French government white paper in November 2002 that encouraged reform of major French regional airports. In 2006 the US magazine Newsweek ranked the city of Toulouse as the fifth most dynamic in the world, largely generated by its huge aerospace activity with associated electronics and computer industries. The city’s airport was instrumental in the award of this ranking. There are now 3,600 employees working at the airport’s airlines and associate companies (excluding the more than 16,000 employed by Airbus), of which 250 are employed by the Société itself. The CCI (Chamber of Commerce & Industry) retains a 25% holding in the new airport company.

In addition to Airbus, some of the major companies based in and around Toulouse include Thales, ATR (Avions Transport Regional), Latécoère (a derivate company of the historic French aircraft manufacturer which now builds aerostructures plus wiring and systems for the Airbus fleet), EADS Astrium Satellites and Skylab. These and numerous associated industries generate considerable numbers of business passengers at Toulouse-Blagnac airport, and account for the crescendo in passenger numbers that rise on a monthly basis to June and then slump in July and August as France goes on holiday. The Airbus ‘shuttle’ is currently operated by German, scheduled and charter, airline OLT (Ostfriesische Lufttransport) linking Toulouse with other Airbus manufacturing centres such as Bristol and Bremen (OLT’s base) using one of their Fokker 100’s, and sometimes a Saab 2000.

Above: The dominant schedule carrier at Toulouse, an Air France Airbus A318 (F-GUGB) is captured on short finals for runway 32R.

Above: OLT and their Fokker 100s are based at Toulouse, shuttling staff to Bristol, Hamburg and other facilities around Europe. Below: One of two Concorde aircraft preserved at Toulouse, F-BVFC will soon become part of the new MATA museum.

For the rest of this article please see the November 2009 issue.