About Charles de Gaulle
Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, also known as Roissy Airport, is the largest international airport in France and the second busiest airport in Europe. Opened in 1974, it is located in Roissy-en-France, 23 km (14 mi) northeast of Paris. It serves as the principal hub for Air France and a destination for other legacy carriers.
The airport is known for its unique and futuristic architecture, particularly Terminal 1, designed by Paul Andreu in the shape of an octopus. Passengers access the satellites via underground tunnels with crisscrossing escalators in the central atrium. Terminal 2 is a massive complex of seven sub-terminals built along a central spine road.
CDG has four parallel runways, allowing for efficient traffic management. It also houses a TGV high-speed train station, directly connecting air passengers to the French rail network and cities like Lyon, Marseille, and Brussels. While criticized for its complex layout, it remains a vital economic engine for the Paris region.
CDG carries a darker footnote in aviation history: on 23 May 2004 a section of the newly opened Terminal 2E collapsed just eleven months after its inauguration, killing four passengers—two Chinese, one Czech and one Lebanese—and prompting the demolition and rebuild of the entire concrete-shell concourse at a cost of 100 million euros. An investigation traced the failure to under-strength reinforcement rings around the porthole windows combined with unusually cold overnight temperatures. Beyond that tragedy, the airport hosts one of the world's most unusual permanent residents: from August 1988 to July 2006 the Iranian refugee Mehran Karimi Nasseri lived continuously inside Terminal 1's ground-floor lounge after losing his transit papers, an ordeal that inspired the Steven Spielberg film "The Terminal" and made Nasseri briefly the airport's most photographed non-employee.