Roland Garros Airport

Roland Garros Airport — named not for the tennis venue but directly for the Réunion-born aviation pioneer and World War I ace who gave his name to both — is the principal gateway to France's overseas department of Réunion and one of the Indian Ocean's busiest airports, handling roughly 2.6M passengers annually. The primary 3,200 m (10,499 ft) runway plus a 2,670 m secondary strip, both sea-level at 20 m (66 ft) elevation, accommodate Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 widebody operations on the long metropolitan-France trunk and give RUN the dual-runway footprint that most insular airports its size lack. About 8 airlines operate 22 routes to 14 destinations (2026). Air France, Corsair, Air Austral (the Réunion-based flag carrier), French bee, and Edelweiss anchor the core long-haul schedule, with most traffic concentrated on the 9,300 km sector to Paris-Orly and Paris-CDG — one of the longest domestic-designated routes in the French national network. Regional service from Air Austral, Air Madagascar, and Air Mauritius connects to Mauritius, Madagascar, Mayotte, Comoros, Seychelles, Johannesburg, and Bangkok. The airport is Air Austral's operating base and maintenance hub. A new international terminal (Aerogare Ouest) opened in 2022, adding jet bridges, a reconfigured baggage system, and substantially expanded international arrivals capacity. RUN's role extends beyond commercial passenger service: it is the designated French military transport hub for the southern Indian Ocean, the alternate for Mauritius, and one of only two French overseas-department airports capable of accepting A380 diversions. Its scheduled network to metropolitan France gives Réunion one of the most extensive long-haul links of any island of its size worldwide.