Le Bourget

Le Bourget began as a military airfield. In the autumn of 1914, with the German armies only just turned back on the Marne, the defences of the Camp retranché de Paris needed landing grounds north of the city, and the fields between Le Bourget, Dugny and Blanc-Mesnil were taken over. For the rest of the war they served as a base for the aircraft protecting Paris. By 1917 observers were photographing the field from the air: a scatter of hangars and sheds on open farmland.

When the war ended, the field was already there. The aircraft were surplus and the pilots needed work, so in 1919 Le Bourget was opened to civil traffic. It became the airport of Paris almost by default. The first regular international passenger services in the world were being tried out in that year, and the Paris to London route was the one that mattered. Farman's Goliath biplanes and their rivals flew it from Le Bourget across the Channel. The press photographers of the early 1920s show a grass field, a wooden gateway marked 'Départ' and luggage carried out by hand.

Through the 1920s the small French airlines that flew from the field were joined and merged. Air Union, formed in 1923, took over the London route. The Compagnie internationale de navigation aérienne flew east to Prague, Vienna and beyond. In 1929 Air Union marked ten years of the Paris to London service with a line-up of airliners on the grass. In 1933 these companies were brought together as Air France, which set up its management at Le Bourget. The field was now the centre of French air transport, the arrival point for foreign airlines and the place record flights ended.

The old buildings could not cope with that role. Aerial photographs from the early 1930s show a long row of arched hangars along the road and hardly anything a passenger would call a terminal. In 1935 the Air Ministry held a competition for a new terminal, won by the architect Georges Labro, and the building was opened on 12 November 1937. By then Paris had a second airfield under construction at Orly, but Le Bourget was still where the city met the air.

The Second World War turned it back into a military base. After the fall of France in June 1940, the German occupiers took the airfield over for the Luftwaffe; Hitler landed there that month for his only visit to Paris. For four years the new terminal and its hangars served a foreign air force. That made the field an Allied target, and by the Liberation in 1944 the airport was a damaged place.

Peace brought traffic back, but the future was elsewhere. Orly had space to grow and Le Bourget, hemmed in by the suburbs, did not. In 1952 Air France moved all its operations to Orly, and in 1953 the Paris Air Show moved in the opposite direction, settling at Le Bourget for good. Other airlines stayed on through the 1960s. In 1976 the airport still handled around two million passengers.

The opening of Roissy to Charles de Gaulle in 1974 settled the matter. In March 1977 the international airlines left Le Bourget, and regional services followed at the start of the 1980s. The airport that had been Paris's front door for half a century became a business-aviation field, a museum and a showground, which is what it has remained.

The grass field of 1919 is long gone. Le Bourget now has three paved runways laid out across its 553 hectares. The longest, 07/25, is 9,800 ft long; the second, 03/21, crosses it at 8,743 ft; and the third, 09/27, is a shorter 6,053 ft. For a field whose everyday traffic is business jets, that is a generous amount of concrete, and the reason is its past. These runways were built for airliners, and they still have to take the heaviest aircraft in the world when the Air Show comes.

The operator says the airport can accommodate aircraft up to the size of the Airbus A380, and at show time it does. Airliners and military transports fly in from all over the world to be parked on the aprons in front of the exhibition halls, then flown in the daily display. For the other fifty weeks of a two-year cycle the same runways handle aircraft a fraction of that size, from light twin-engined jets to long-range business aircraft able to reach Asia or America non-stop.

The airfield is ringed by town. Dugny, Le Bourget, Le Blanc-Mesnil and Gonesse press in on its sides, and the A1 motorway runs along its western edge. From the air it is a green island with industrial buildings pressed against its borders. Aprons and hangars fill the edges of the site: the business-aviation terminals, the maintenance companies, the Air Show's permanent exhibition centre and the museum's collection of parked aircraft.

Air traffic control has long since moved out of the tower on the 1937 terminal into a modern tower on the airfield. The old one is now part of the museum. From its windows, visitors look straight down onto the business jets taxiing below, a museum and a working airport sharing one view.

Le Bourget's airspace is also crowded. It sits directly between Paris and Roissy to Charles de Gaulle, under the busiest approach paths in France, so its traffic has to be fitted in around the arrivals and departures of its much larger neighbour.

The terminal Georges Labro designed for the 1935 competition is the reason Le Bourget still looks like an airport of the 1930s. It is a long, low building in pale stone, symmetrical and horizontal, with tall bands of glazing on the airfield side and the words 'Paris Le Bourget' across the top. Its central halls rise above the wings on either side, and a control tower stands on the curved terraces where spectators once watched the aircraft come in. It was opened on 12 November 1937, the year of the Paris International Exhibition, when Paris was receiving the world.

Inside, it was built for a new kind of traveller. Passengers moved through halls lit from above, including a hall of eight columns and a rotunda under a dome of glass blocks. It is a small building by modern standards. In the late 1930s it was a showpiece of modern French architecture, and it survived the Occupation, the Liberation and thirty more years of airline traffic with its character intact.

When the airlines left for Orly and Roissy, the terminal lost its original purpose and found another. The Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace, which had opened its first hall at Le Bourget in 1975, gradually took over the historic building. A long restoration followed. The hall of eight columns was restored and reopened in 2013, and the museum reorganised its entrance and galleries around the old terminal in the years after. Visitors now reach the collection through the same halls and the same doors as the passengers of 1937, and can climb to the old control tower, where an exhibition on air navigation is installed.

Passengers who fly from Le Bourget today never see that building. The airport has no public terminal in the airline sense. Business travellers are handled in eight private terminals run by specialist handling companies, the fixed-base operators, each with its own lounges, customs and security, parked aircraft a few steps from the door. These buildings line the business-aviation aprons. They are modern, discreet and functional, and they are where the airport earns its living.

Le Bourget is the leading business-aviation airport in Europe, and that is essentially all it does as an airport. There are no airline gates, no departure boards and no baggage halls. What moves through it is a steady stream of private and corporate jets, air-taxi flights, government aircraft and medical flights, carrying executives, officials and patients rather than holidaymakers. Groupe ADP counted 63,780 movements in 2022, a figure inflated by the rebound after the pandemic, and expected about 57,000 in 2025.

The business is shared out among specialist companies. Seven fixed-base operators run the eight business terminals, competing for the same customers on service: fuel, handling, hangar space, crew rest, and the speed with which a passenger can get from a car at the door to a seat on the aircraft. Behind them sits a cluster of nearly a hundred companies working in maintenance, aircraft completion and modification, equipment and airport services. The operator puts direct employment on the site at more than 3,500 jobs, with nearly 10,000 more indirect jobs in related activity.

Some of those neighbours are well known. France's air accident investigation bureau, the BEA, has had its headquarters at Le Bourget since 1994, and its laboratories there read flight recorders from accidents far beyond France. Airbus Helicopters moved its Paris-region site to the airport in 2011.

Le Bourget also has a public-service role that its glamour hides. It is the leading airport in Europe for medical and health flights, the organ transports, patient repatriations and emergency transfers that need an airfield close to the centre of Paris and able to operate at short notice. Those flights are the exception to the airport's night restrictions.

Le Bourget has always been close to Paris, and that is still its main selling point. The airport sits beside the A1, the Autoroute du Nord, which runs from the Porte de la Chapelle past Saint-Denis and the Stade de France to Roissy. For most of its business passengers the journey starts and ends in a car, and outside rush hour the centre of Paris is a short drive away. That proximity is exactly what a traveller pays for when choosing a private jet over an airline from Charles de Gaulle.

Public transport is less direct. RER line B, the regional express line that also serves Charles de Gaulle, stops at Le Bourget station, some distance south of the airfield, and a local bus covers the rest of the way to the airport and the museum. The T11 Express tram-train, which runs around the northern suburbs, also calls at Le Bourget station, so visitors can reach the area without going through Paris.

That is changing. Line 17 of the Grand Paris Express, the automatic metro being built to link Saint-Denis Pleyel with Charles de Gaulle, will have a station named Le Bourget Aéroport, expected in 2027 or 2028. The station is forecast to carry about 25,000 passengers a day. For the first time since the airlines left, the airport, its business district, the exhibition centre and the museum will be on the metro map.

An airport that sits in the middle of dense suburbs lives with its neighbours, and Le Bourget's neighbours are close. Houses and flats in Dugny, Le Blanc-Mesnil and Le Bourget itself stand within a few hundred metres of the airfield fence. The traffic is lighter than at Orly or Charles de Gaulle, but business jets fly at all hours and their departures climb out over homes.

The main protection is a curfew on departures. Take-offs are restricted from 22:15 to 06:00, with exceptions for emergency medical and health flights, which are the airport's public-service mission and cannot wait for the morning. Groupe ADP presents its relations with the surrounding towns through a dedicated neighbours' programme, which publishes the airport's figures and restrictions for local residents.

The business-aviation sector is also under pressure over emissions. A private jet carries a handful of people, so its carbon footprint per passenger is far higher than an airliner's, and the argument over whether such flights should be taxed or limited is conducted in France largely with Le Bourget in mind. The airport's answer so far has been to make sustainable aviation fuel available: it has a station dedicated to aviation biofuels, supplying operators who choose to use it.

The most famous night in Le Bourget's history began with a disappearance. On 8 May 1927, two French airmen, the war ace Charles Nungesser and the navigator François Coli, took off from Le Bourget in a Levasseur biplane named L'Oiseau Blanc, trying to be the first to fly non-stop from Paris to New York and win the Orteig Prize. They were last seen crossing the French coast. What became of them has never been established; the museum at Le Bourget keeps the landing gear they dropped after take-off to save weight.

Two weeks later the prize went the other way. On the evening of 21 May 1927, Charles Lindbergh, a young American airmail pilot, crossed the coast of France in a single-engined monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, and found his way to Le Bourget after some 33 and a half hours alone in the air from New York. Word had spread through Paris, and a crowd estimated at around 200,000 people had come out to the airfield. When he landed, at about half past ten at night, it broke through the barriers and ran onto the field.

The next days turned the airport into a stage. The Spirit of St. Louis was pushed into a hangar under guard and admired by crowds, while Lindbergh was received by the President of the Republic, Gaston Doumergue, and fêted across the city. The flight made him a celebrity overnight on both sides of the Atlantic, and it made Le Bourget, for the rest of the interwar years, the place where long-distance flights were meant to end.

It was the start, too, of long flights heading west. On 1 September 1930, Dieudonné Costes and Maurice Bellonte took off from Le Bourget in a Breguet 19 named Point d'Interrogation and landed in New York the next day, the first non-stop flight from Paris to New York. When they came home in October the airport filled again, this time for a French crew. Their aircraft is now in the Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace, a short walk from where it left.

The airport has seen darker moments. In June 1940 Adolf Hitler landed at Le Bourget for his brief tour of conquered Paris. Two decades later, on 16 June 1961, the Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev broke away from his minders at the airport as the Kirov company prepared to leave for London, and asked for asylum in France.

And the Air Show has had its tragedies. On 3 June 1973, the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 supersonic airliner broke up during its display and crashed into the village of Goussainville, killing its crew and people on the ground. A MiG-29 crashed during the 1989 show and a Sukhoi Su-30 in 1999; in both cases the pilots ejected and no one was killed.

The flights that began and ended here are remembered on the site. In 1928 a monument to Nungesser, Coli and Lindbergh was unveiled at Le Bourget before a large crowd, joining the two crossings of 1927 in one memorial. A monument to the three airmen stands in front of the museum today.

Le Bourget matters to world aviation today less for the aircraft that use it than for the two institutions that share it. The first is the Paris Air Show, the Salon international de l'aéronautique et de l'espace. It is older than the airport: the first aeronautical exhibition was held in 1909 under the glass roof of the Grand Palais, when aircraft were shown like motor cars. After the Second World War the show moved out to airfields, and in 1953 it settled at Le Bourget for good. It has been held every two years, in odd-numbered years, ever since.

The show is organised by SIAE, a subsidiary of GIFAS, the French aerospace industries association, and measured by exhibitors and exhibition space it is the largest aerospace event in the world. The 2025 edition, from 16 to 22 June, brought together some 2,400 exhibitors from 48 countries and 141,000 trade visitors. The first four days are for professionals; at the weekend the public comes to watch the flying.

For seventy years the Salon has been where aircraft introduce themselves. Concorde made its first Paris appearance there in 1969 and its last in 2003. The Soviet Tu-144 came in 1971 and again in 1973, when it crashed. Airbus, the European consortium born in France, brought its first airliner, the A300, in its own demonstration colours in 1977. Every edition since has been a contest of order announcements between Airbus and Boeing, and between fighter makers competing for export contracts.

The runways built for airliners make that possible. During the show the airfield fills with aircraft of every size, from light aircraft to the A380, and veteran aircraft share the flying display with the newest types.

The second institution is the Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace. It was founded in 1919 at Chalais-Meudon on the proposal of the engineer Albert Caquot and is one of the oldest aviation museums in the world. Its first hall at Le Bourget opened in 1975, and over the following decades the collection took over the 1937 terminal, the surrounding hangars and a large part of the apron.

It now holds more than 19,000 items, including about 150 aircraft. The early hall covers the pioneers and the First World War, with a SPAD VII flown by Georges Guynemer. The Second World War is represented by aircraft on both sides, among them a Supermarine Spitfire and a North American P-51 Mustang. In the space hall are Ariane rockets and the Soyuz T-6 capsule in which Jean-Loup Chrétien became the first French astronaut.

The Concorde hall holds two of them: the French prototype 001, F-WTSS, and F-BTSD 'Sierra Delta', an aircraft Air France flew in service. Outside, visitors can go aboard an Air France Boeing 747-128, the aircraft that made long-haul travel a mass market. A Douglas C-47 Dakota, the military DC-3, is also displayed, and since 14 February 2017 an Airbus A380 has joined the collection.

In 2025 the museum welcomed nearly 394,000 visitors. They walk from Nungesser and Coli's landing gear to the Point d'Interrogation of Costes and Bellonte to the Concordes, all within sight of the runways where the story played out.

That is Le Bourget's place in aviation. Paris's first airport made history in the 1920s and 1930s, lost its airlines to larger airports, and now keeps that history on show beside the business jets that still use its runways.