The French authorities have banned all short-haul domestic flights in the interest of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Legislators voted two years ago in favor of a proposal to cancel flights on routes where the same journey can be made by train within two and a half hours. Now, for example, planes will not fly from Paris to Nantes, Lyon, or Bordeaux, but critics of the ban have already called it symbolic.
Laurent Doncel, acting head of the Airlines for Europe (A4E) industry group, told AFP that the ban on such flights would only have a minimal effect on CO2 emissions.
According to him, instead of such bans, the government should support more realistic approaches to solving this problem.
The coronavirus pandemic has hit airlines around the world hard. According to Flightradar24, a website that tracks all commercial flights, there was a 42% drop in flights last year compared to pre-Covid 2019.
Meanwhile, the French authorities demanded even more stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
It was created in the same 2019 by President Macron, the Civil Convention on Climate, which was signed by 150 representatives of the French public, proposed to ban all flights that could be replaced by a train ride within 4 hours.
However, in the end, after objections from some regions and Air France-KLM, they settled on a figure of two and a half hours.