Anyone reading the recent news in some media could be forgiven for believing France has banned all domestic flights.

Not only is this untrue, but this development in France, which affects specific flights only, is old news – we first reported on it in May 2020.

As we reported here, the restriction does not apply to connecting flights.

The situation becomes more complicated when I checked Air France’s website for Lyon-Paris CDG.

Although Air France no longer sells tickets from Lyon to Paris Orly it continues to sell point-to-point tickets for Lyon-Paris CDG (at the time of writing).

In July as many as seven Air France flights a day will be plying this route.

So one can still fly Lyon-Paris provided CDG is used rather than Orly.

This is all the more surprising when you consider the same route is served by SNCF’s TGVs.

Now Allrail (which represents rail new entrants) tweets that it wants France’s time limit to be extended to four hours and, even more controversially, it wants air to surrender to rail on short international flights.

Allrail mentions routes like Vienna-Munich, Gothenburg-Stockholm and even Amsterdam-London.

One wonders whether or not Allrail understands commercial aviation or even if they believe Eurostar or Schiphol’s train station could cope with the three million air passengers who (pre-Covid) travelled Amsterdam-London.

airfrance.co.uk