Charles de Gaulle

Paris had outgrown Orly by the early 1960s. Orly sits south of the city inside the suburbs, hemmed in exactly as Heathrow is, and by 1961 Aéroport de Paris, the state body that has run the region's airports since 1945, had concluded that no amount of building there would meet the traffic it expected. The decision was to start again somewhere with room.

In 1964 the site was fixed: the plain around Roissy-en-France, north-east of the city, flat, agricultural, thinly populated and crossed by the future line of the A1 autoroute. The state bought the land outright before the design existed. That sequence (land first, plan second) is the single fact from which everything else about the airport follows, and it is precisely the sequence Britain never managed.

Construction began in 1966 on what was then called Aéroport de Paris Nord. The commission for the passenger terminal went to Paul Andreu, an engineer of the École Polytechnique who had qualified as an architect the year before and was twenty-nine years old. He would go on to design terminals at this airport for the next thirty-five years, and very little else at Roissy is not his.

The airport opened on 8 March 1974, renamed for the general who had died four years earlier, with one terminal, one pair of runways and an Air France departure for New York. Terminal 1 was finished on the opening day, which is worth stating plainly beside Heathrow's first morning in 1946: army tents on duckboards, and nine years before a permanent building.

Growth came in planned increments rather than crises. Terminal 2 began in 1982 and was added to for the next twenty-six years. The TGV station opened beneath Hall 2C in 1994. A third runway opened in 2001 and a fourth in 2000, completing the two doublets. The automatic shuttle that finally joined the terminals to each other arrived only in 2007: the one piece of the plan that was allowed to run late, and the one passengers complained about most.

Aéroports de Paris was converted from a state body into a limited company in 2005 and floated on the Paris exchange in 2006, but the French state remains its largest shareholder with just over half the capital. The airport is therefore run commercially and owned politically, which is the opposite of Heathrow's arrangement and explains why expansion at Roissy is settled in government policy rather than in a decade-long planning inquiry.

The airfield is four runways in two pairs, and the pairing is the point. Two strips lie north of the terminal area, 09R/27L at 14,000 ft and 09L/27R at 8,900 ft, and two lie south, 08L/26R at 13,590 ft and 08R/26L at 8,900 ft. Each pair is close-spaced and worked as a unit: one runway takes the arrivals, the other the departures, and the two doublets operate independently of one another. Four runways used this way give roughly twice the capacity of Heathrow's two, on a site that has room for the taxiways to reach them.

The original layout had only the two long strips; the two short ones were added in 2000 and 2001 to complete the doublets. That the airport could add a runway in a year, twice, without a public inquiry is the clearest single contrast with London, where the equivalent decision has been argued since the 1990s and is still not built.

All four are asphalt and equipped for Category III approaches, which matters on a plain that fogs in autumn. The prevailing wind is westerly, so most days the airport lands and departs on the 26 and 27 headings, over open country to the east and the Paris basin to the west.

Freight is the other half of the operation and the half that does not show. Roissy moved 1,914,681 tonnes in 2024, second in Europe only to Frankfurt, and unlike Heathrow, where cargo travels in the holds of passenger aircraft because a freighter cannot justify a slot, a large share of it here moves in dedicated freighters at night. FedEx runs its European hub from the airport and Air France-KLM Martinair Cargo operates from it; the night quota is tighter than it once was, but the capacity exists because nobody had to choose between a passenger flight and a freighter for the same movement.

Terminal 1 is a drum. Ten storeys of raw concrete, two hundred metres across, hollow at the centre, with the check-in and gates arranged in rings and the passengers carried across the empty middle on escalators running inside transparent tubes. The aircraft do not touch it: they park at seven detached circular satellites reached by tunnels under the apron. Andreu's idea was that a passenger should walk as little as possible and see the whole machine while doing it, and the crossing tubes have been photographed more than any other airport interior in Europe.

It is also a building that cannot grow. A circle is finished the moment it closes, and by the time Roissy needed more capacity the only options were to demolish it or to build something else. The airport built something else, and Terminal 1 was refitted rather than replaced: most recently through a renovation completed in 2022 that kept the concrete and rebuilt everything inside it.

Terminal 2 is the opposite argument in built form. Begun in 1982, it is a two-kilometre spine with seven halls set along it in facing pairs, lettered 2A to 2G in the order they were needed rather than the order of the alphabet: 2A and 2B in 1982, 2D in 1989, 2C in 1993, 2F in 1999, 2E in 2003, 2G in 2008. Each is a different building by a different hand within Andreu's frame, and the sequence reads as a thirty-year argument about what a terminal should look like, from the low symmetrical crescents of the first pair to the concrete vault of 2E and the light steel shed of 2G. The railway station sits in the middle of the spine, which is why the whole thing is laid out as a street.

Terminal 3 is a shed. It opened in 1991 as Aérogare 9, a temporary building for charter traffic, and was never replaced. It has no jetways; passengers board by bus from remote stands. On an airport known internationally for its architecture, the plainest building handles the low-cost traffic, which is a fair description of how European aviation actually divided itself after 1995.

Charles de Gaulle is Air France's hub and has been since the airline moved its long-haul operation here from Orly. The carrier and its SkyTeam partners occupy most of Terminal 2 (2E and 2F for the long-haul and Schengen banks, 2G for the regional feed) and the whole shape of the day is built around connecting one to the other. Around a third of the airport's passengers are transferring rather than starting or ending a journey in Paris.

The airport was designed for that. The runways are far enough apart that arrivals and departures do not interfere, the halls are laid out so a bank can be turned inside a single building, and the terminals sit between the doublets rather than at one end of the field. It is a hub in the way an American hub is a hub, built for the purpose rather than adapted to it, and the contrast with Heathrow, where connecting passengers cross under a runway between terminals, is the plainest illustration of what planning whole buys you.

easyJet operates a large base here and FedEx Express runs its European freight hub from the cargo area, so the airport carries three quite different businesses on one field: a legacy long-haul hub, a low-cost short-haul base, and an overnight express operation. About 105 airlines use it.

The number the airport does not have is a movement cap of the kind that governs Heathrow. Roissy operates under noise-related restrictions, particularly at night, but not under a hard annual ceiling on flights, and its constraint is the practical one of runway and airspace capacity rather than a figure written into a planning consent. That difference is why the two airports' growth curves look nothing alike.

Two railways serve the airport and they do quite different jobs. The RER B, the regional express line, runs from stations beneath Terminal 2 and Terminal 3 into Gare du Nord, Châtelet and the Latin Quarter in about thirty-five minutes. It is the cheap route and the crowded one: it is a suburban line first and an airport link second, shared with the northern suburbs it passes through, and it has been the subject of complaint for as long as it has existed.

The other is a main-line high-speed station. Aéroport Charles de Gaulle 2 TGV opened under Hall 2C in 1994 on the eastern interconnection line, and it puts Lille, Brussels, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Strasbourg within a direct train of the departure gates without touching Paris at all. No other European hub has this. It is why Air France sells rail legs under its own flight numbers, why a passenger from Lille flies from Roissy rather than from Lille, and why the airport's catchment is a large part of northern France rather than a single city.

Inside the airport, CDGVAL, a driverless shuttle opened in 2007, links the three terminals to the car parks and both stations. Before it, moving between Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 meant a bus on the public road, which for thirty-three years was the weakest part of an otherwise carefully planned machine.

By road the airport sits between the A1 to the west and the A104 to the south. A dedicated non-stop rail link to central Paris, CDG Express, has been promised, funded, litigated and delayed for two decades and is still not open: the one piece of the Roissy plan that has taken longer than a British planning inquiry.

Roissy has no third-runway argument, because it built its third and fourth runways in 2000 and 2001 and nobody had to be persuaded. What it has instead is an argument about terminals, and it is the same argument in a different form: how much more traffic should be brought to a place that already has a great deal of it.

The largest proposal of the last decade was Terminal 4, a new complex east of the existing ones that would have added capacity for something like forty million passengers a year and made Roissy comfortably the busiest airport in Europe. It was abandoned in February 2021. The government asked Aéroports de Paris to withdraw the scheme on environmental grounds, and the company did, a decision with no British parallel, and one that arrived by ministerial instruction rather than through a court.

What has replaced it is renovation rather than extension. Terminal 1 was rebuilt inside its concrete drum in a programme completed in 2022; Terminal 2B and 2D were joined and reworked into a single junction building; the 2E satellites carry the long-haul growth. The airport's stated direction is now to raise the quality and the environmental performance of what exists rather than to add another terminal to the eastern fields.

That is a real difference in kind from London. Heathrow's expansion question is whether it may add its first new runway since 1946. Roissy's is whether it should use the capacity it already built: and the answer, so far, has been not all of it.

The plain north-east of Paris was chosen in 1964 partly because few people lived on it, and that choice has aged better than almost any other decision in European airport planning. Roissy's approaches cross open country and small towns rather than a dense city, and the airport is not the permanent political problem that Heathrow's noise footprint has been for sixty years.

It is not silent. Night flights are the sharp edge here as everywhere: the airport carries a large overnight freight operation, and the communities of the Val-d'Oise and Seine-et-Marne under the approach paths have campaigned for years against movements between midnight and five. France has tightened the night quota progressively, capping the number of permitted night slots and banning the noisiest aircraft outright, and the argument continues within those limits rather than about whether they should exist.

Air quality and ground access carry the rest of the environmental case. The airport is bounded by two motorways and generates a large amount of road traffic that the RER B was never sized to absorb, which is the main environmental argument for CDG Express and one reason the project has survived twenty years of delay.

The Terminal 4 cancellation in 2021 was the first time a major European airport expansion was stopped by its own government on climate and environmental grounds before any court was involved. Whatever one makes of the decision, it settled a question at Roissy that London has spent two decades unable to settle at all.

On 21 January 1976 an Air France Concorde left for Rio de Janeiro at the same moment a British Airways Concorde left Heathrow for Bahrain, the two first scheduled supersonic passenger services in the world, timed to depart together. Paris to New York opened in November 1977, and Air France flew Concorde from Roissy until 2003. The type's whole commercial life ran between this airport and London's.

Concorde's end also began here. On 25 July 2000 an Air France Concorde bound for New York struck debris on the runway during its take-off roll, suffered a tyre burst that ruptured a fuel tank and crashed at Gonesse shortly afterwards, killing all 109 people on board and four on the ground. The type was grounded, modified and returned to service, but never recovered commercially and was withdrawn in 2003.

The airport's other defining event was structural. Hall 2E opened in June 2003 as Andreu's long concrete vault, a boarding pier built as a tube without internal columns. At about seven in the morning on 23 May 2004, a section roughly thirty metres long collapsed onto the concourse below, killing four people. The administrative inquiry reported in February 2005 that there had been no single failure: the design had carried very little margin, the concrete shell had been weakened where metal struts pierced it, and the structure had little capacity to redistribute load once any part of it gave way. The pier was demolished and rebuilt to a different structural principle, and the satellites added afterwards now carry the airport's long-haul and A380 gates.

It is worth stating plainly rather than dramatically. Four people died in a building barely a year old, designed by the architect of the airport itself, and the finding was not a villain but an accumulation of decisions each of which had almost enough margin. That is how most structural failures actually happen, and it is why the rebuilt pier looks heavier than the one it replaced.

Charles de Gaulle is the argument for planning an airport whole, and it is a strong one. Four runways in two independent doublets, terminals in the middle with room to be added to, a high-speed railway under the departure hall, and a site large enough that none of those decisions had to be traded against another. Every one of those things is difficult or impossible to retrofit, and every one of them is something Heathrow has spent decades trying to obtain by other means.

It is also the argument against believing a plan will survive contact with fifty years. Terminal 1 is a masterpiece that cannot be extended. Terminal 2 grew into something nobody drew in 1982 and is coherent only in the way a street is coherent. The shuttle that ties it all together arrived thirty-three years late, the express rail link to Paris still has not arrived, and the terminal that was to complete the plan was cancelled by the government that owns the airport. A whole plan is not the same as a finished one.

Its place in world aviation is as the largest airport in continental Europe, the second-busiest on the continent by passengers and by freight, Air France's hub and the European gateway that a French rail passenger reaches without changing trains. Alongside Heathrow it forms the pair that most of the transatlantic and Europe-to-Asia traffic is routed through, and the two are usually described as rivals. They are better read as two answers to one question, how a European capital builds an airport, given sixty years apart, by two countries with very different ideas about who decides.