Polls showed that over 70% of French people disapproved of the construction of a new platform. To compensate for theabandonment of the Notre-Dame-des-Landes projectthe government is going to speed up the development of Nantes Atlantique and - to a lesser extent - Rennes-St Jacques.
Officially launched in 1974The Notre-Dame-des-Landes project symbolised the confidence in the future so typical of the era. The future platform was intended to be a gateway to Europe for airlines flying the North Atlantic. There was even talk of bringing the Concorde and transfer passengers to the rest of Europe by TGV. Relaunched in 2000, Notre-Dame-des-Landes was finally declared a project of public interest in 2008. A 55-year concession was then granted to the company "Greater West Airports comprising VINCI Airports, the Nantes Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Entreprise de Travaux Publics de l'Ouest (ETPO-CIFE). Aéroports du Grand Ouest is a VINCI subsidiary, both builder of the defunct project and concession holder for the Nantes Atlantiques and Saint-Nazaire airports.
The Grand Ouest airport was to accommodate nine million passengers a year with a single runway - as opposed to the original two, a concession made to the platform's opponents by Ségolène Royal, the former French Minister for Ecology. However, the project seemed to face a number of obstacles, starting with its size. Nantes Atlantique recorded 5.2 million passengers last year, an increase of almost 15%. Traffic at the hub jumped by 47% between 2011 and 2016... At a rate of 10% per year, Nantes would reach the nine million passengers by 2025three years after the opening of the new airport. At an average annual growth rate of 5%, Notre-Dame-des-Landes would also have been saturated around 2030, less than a decade after it opened!
In fact, the recent expert report raised the possibility of extending the Nantes-Atlantique hub, based on a in-depth study by the DGAC dated 2014. It already envisaged the long-term extension of the runway to 3,600 metres from 2,900 metres, and the creation of new runway access roads for aircraft. The civil aviation experts also envisaged the construction of a new terminal (Terminal 2), which would double the size of the terminal from 32,000 m² to 67,000 m². Twelve additional aircraft could also be parked on the tarmac.
The major advantage of abandoning Notre-Dame-des-Landes is that it will speed up the expansion of Nantes Atlantique. Some 450 million euros should be underway within the next two years to accommodate future traffic at Nantes. An optimistic vision, but it is reasonable to think that by 2021, Nantes could finally have a new terminal: a necessity at a time when the current terminal is totally saturated.
In just a few years, Nantes has become seventh busiest airport in France while the airlines continue to expand.add new lines. For the spring/summer 2018 season alone, Transavia will be opening four new routes to Casablanca, Catania, Djerba and Rome, Volotea will be launching Nantes-Pula, while Air Transat is returning to Nantes-...Montréal. This winter, HOP inaugurated a Nantes-Hamburg while Lufthansa positioned itself on Nantes-Munich.
As for Rennes-St Jacques, we are likely to see a redevelopment rather than a real expansion of the hub, as the airport's surface area is already limited. The recent arrival of Easyjet should enable traffic to quickly reach one million passengers, after more than 700,000 in 2017 (+15%). The metro could link the centre of Rennes to the airport.
