Movie Star Airport: Paris Charles de Gaulle

Paris Charles de Gaulle is a movie star! Your eyes are not deceiving you, I did say movie star. From time to time I will write a little piece on an airport that has featured prominently in a movie or movies.

Terminal 1 at CDG featured heavily in the movie The Concorde… Airport ’79. In Australia and the UK the name of the movie is Airport ’80: The Concorde. When I first flew to Paris I arrived in Terminal 1 and instantly recognised where I was.

Those Central Travelator Tubes!

A star within a star are the tubes in the centre of Terminal 1 which let you go from level to level. It is quite an interesting thing to see and unique to CDG as far as I can tell.

Travelators take you to the arrivals level or departures level of the main terminal. Signage is relatively easy to follow and once you’re in one of the clear tubes you can enjoy the unusual view. Aer Lingus is one of the airlines flying from Terminal 1 so I rather enjoy taking them to Paris. But what about the movie?

CDG As A Star Of Airport ’79!

The featured image in this post is taken from the title credits of the movie which shows Concorde taxiing past Terminal 1. Permission to film the movie must have included a clause to include French aircraft as both an Airbus A300 and a Caravelle are in the sequence. Both Air France and both made in France.

During the movie there is a whole chase scene which is set inside Terminal 1. Not much has changed apart from the fact that the giant fountain appears to be gone.

Our guy runs all around Terminal 1 and it gives quite a good indication of how it all looked back in the 1970s. After this he runs out onto the tarmac and almost gets run over by Concorde. It’s one of the last movies in the disaster movie genre that was very popular in the 70s.

Overall Thoughts

It’s quite fun to visit an airport and recognise various things from a movie. As a person who enjoys history, it’s nice to be able to experience these things and not only have the movie to refer to. Knocking things down and replacing them really deprives people of the joy of actually being there.

There are more movie star airports coming soon. Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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Featured image and movie images via Universal Pictures from Airport ’79… The Concorde.