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Paris 2024: after the Games, Roissy airport wants to improve reception for the disabled
Five days before the opening of the Paralympic Games, Roissy airport is getting into battle order to welcome athletes with reduced mobility and their companions. How to set up several dozen wheelchairs, as soon as they exit the plane?
(France 2)
Five days before the opening of the Paralympic Games, Roissy airport is getting into battle order to welcome athletes with reduced mobility and their companions.
After a 9.5 hour flight, the 25 Colombian Paralympic athletes were delighted to arrive in Paris. To welcome the 1,500 para-athletes, a special organization was put in place. In containers, the athletes’ personal wheelchairs are the first to come out of the hold, so that they can be handed over to them in less than ten minutes.
“These are processes that we have already put in place, except that now we find ourselves with exceptional volumes to process.”explains Vincent Delage, the head of the Paris 2024 operation for Air France. The athletes are used to it, since this welcome is already in force abroad, in other airports.
The Paralympic Games will therefore be an opportunity for Parisian airports to improve the reception of people with disabilities. “A realization”, said Régis Lacote, the director of Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport, who wants “generalize (…) for the whole [de]s customers” the procedure.