Paris-Orly Airport

Paris-Orly is the Paris system's second international gateway and France's second-busiest airport overall, carrying roughly 33M passengers (2024) in a complementary split with Charles de Gaulle that few multi-airport metros manage so cleanly. Orly historically handled all Paris air traffic from its 1932 opening until CDG came online in 1974, and it retains that legacy role as the preferred base for short-haul Europe, North Africa, the French overseas departments (Antilles, Réunion, Mayotte), and a growing roster of long-haul leisure routes. The airport is an Air France hub on domestic and medium-haul, the principal French base for Transavia France, and a major operating point for easyJet, Vueling, Corsair, and French Bee — the last two anchoring low-cost long-haul service to the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and U.S. west coast. Four terminals (Orly 1, 2, 3, 4) were physically linked into a single continuous building in 2019, 260,000 sqm (2.8M sqft) of connected concourse, and are served by three runways up to 3,650 m (11,975 ft). Orly sits 13 km (8 mi) south of central Paris, inside the dense urban envelope, which drives its strict 23:30–06:00 curfew and the 250,000-movement annual cap — among the tightest regulatory ceilings imposed on any major European hub. International reach from ORY spans 172 destinations across 34 airlines, with particular density on the Maghreb (Algiers, Casablanca, Tunis, Marrakech), West Africa (Dakar, Abidjan, Douala), and the French DOM-TOM. Métro Line 14's 2024 extension to Orly completed the decades-long effort to pull the airport into central Paris on a single rail mode.