Airport Toulouse-Blagnac

Location
The airport is about 8 km northwest of Toulouse city centre directly on the city’s motorway A621. The airport is easily reached via the motorways A620 and A621. Arriving from Toulouse city centre, exit the city via the Allée de Barcelone in the direction of Bordeaux, Auch and Blagnac. From the motorway interchange A620, proceed to the motorway A620 - E9 taking the exit 31, and then driving to the right to the A621 and at the exit changing to the right lane, signposted “Aéroport Blagnac, Grenade”, then ending up on the D901, following this to the airport exit 4. From the bus station Gare Routière, Toulouse airport may be reached using the Courriers de la Garonne or the shuttle and scheduled buses in order to get to the city centre. The main stops of the shuttle bus include the Gare Routière, Allées Jean Jaurès, Place Jeanne d’Arc and Centre Compans Caffarelli. Buses also run in the region around Toulouse and the company NOVATEL , for example, provide a daily service to Andorra. The buses of the company Interlignes run between the airport in Toulouse and various cities in the region of Albi, Carmaux, Castres and Mazamet.

History
In the year 1939, at the beginning of the First World War, the already famous French pilot, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, opened a repair workshop on the airfield, from where the airline Latécoère was already operating flights to Casablanca and Dakar. The airport also received two runways of about 800 m in length. Only after the capitulation of the German army in the year 1945 was the airport opened for civil use. The check in terminal was initially only provisional, in the form of a wooden barracks and in the following years extensive building works were undertaken until finally in 1953, the first real airport building Blagnac 1 could be opened. Further construction works included extending the runways between 1964 and 1968 to 3 and 3.5 km. On 2nd march 1969 the first test flight of the Concorde 001 prototype, which had been in development since 1962, could take place. Passenger numbers increased continually, the terminal building Blagnac 1 had, however, only been constructed to deal with a maximum of 400,000 passengers a year and this meant that the construction of a new terminal building Blagnac 2 in April 1978 became unavoidable. The terminal was extended by several more halls in the years 1993 and 2004. In addition, in 1993 a control tower was built and the last building site was an extensive multi storey car park for several thousand cars, which was opened in 2002. Currently, the airport is the site of more building works: in 2009, a new terminal is to be taken into use in order to enable the current capacity of 6 million passengers to be increased further, to facilitate 9 million by the year 2015.