Seen from the outside, the blue buildings of Beauvais-Tillé airport are neither very large nor very beautiful. With their undulating walls, they even look like sheds planted in the countryside. Especially since inside the infrastructure of the two terminals hardly encourages dreams either. Here, no luxury boutiques, no cozy armchairs, no padded lounges or electric carts. Normal: this platform located in the Oise, 100 kilometers north of Paris, exclusively accommodates low-cost flights, mostly to Europe. You go there by car or coach, with luggage kept to a minimum, as are the facilities and the price of tickets.
This is the implicit promise of this place: to allow you to travel across the continent without breaking the bank. A possibility that the enlargement of the European Union (EU) to the East has developed to considerable extents. To the point that in twenty years this site has become the ninth French airport in terms of flows and continues to grow at a rapid pace. More than 6 million passengers are expected in 2024, compared to 4.6 in 2022.
The story of this metamorphosis begins in 1997, with the deregulation of air transport. From this date, any company established in the EU can freely serve the destinations of its choice. Sensing a good deal, the Irish Ryanair immediately looked for platforms to set up on. In France, the company did not hesitate for long: it set its sights on the Beauvais aerodrome, equipped with a runway 2,400 meters long and 45 wide, meeting the standards imposed by the Treaty Organization. of the North Atlantic. During the Second World War, the place welcomed German bombers on their way to England, then Allied planes, before once again becoming, in the 1950s, a civilian airport from which people took off to Great Britain. .
“Affinity leisure activities”
Business went well for around twenty years, but at the time when the Irish company took an interest in it, the air base was in decline, stifled by competition from Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport, inaugurated in 1974. “In 1996, Beauvais only welcomed 60,000 passengers per year, indicates Philippe Trubert, director of the Syndicat Mixte de Beauvais-Tillé, the establishment that owns the premises. He was almost at a standstill. » The arrival of Ryanair in May 1997 changed the situation: the Irish company, whose aircraft now provide 80% of the airport’s traffic, experienced immediate success. Since 2000, Beauvais has already seen 387,000 travelers pass through per year, for 4,500 “movements”, in other words takeoffs and landings.
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