Olympian effort for the opening ceremony in Paris

Friday 26 July and all eyes were on Paris for the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympics.

Our eyes were on the skies, though, where a huge 80-mile exclusion zone around the French capital kicked in at 4.30pm and stayed in place till 10pm.  How to deal with air traffic unable to fly through some of Europe’s busiest airspace had been the subject of six months’ planning co-ordinated by the French ATC provider DSNA and Eurocontrol.  For neighbouring countries like the UK this meant a massive amount of planning for the air traffic likely to reroute through our airspace.

One of our senior operational managers went to Paris some two years ago to share our experience of the London Olympics in 2012, and how we managed the airspace challenges for those Games, to help the Paris team put the best provisions in place this year.

The result of all that hard work is shown up in our latest data visualisation video, which illustrates the huge “donut” created by the exclusion zone, and the air traffic squeezed into routes around it.

As always, our first consideration was safety.  Our second priority was to coordinate with our neighbours, especially in northern Europe, to try and keep the traffic flows moving smoothly, with minimal delay.

We held regular calls with airlines and airports in the run-up to the Games, asking airlines to plan their routes further north than usual to avoid bottlenecks in what we call the Dover and Clacton sectors of airspace to the south and southeast, where our interface with Europe is one of the busiest in Europe at the best of times.

You can see clearly in the datavis just how busy that corridor of airspace was last Friday evening.

In the week before the opening ceremony we provided daily updates to airlines and airports, and added more resource into our network and flight planning team to help with flight planning queries.

It was impossible to avoid any delays on the night, given the constraints you can see in the video, but they were kept to a minimum and most importantly of all, everyone went safely on their way.