Orly (France) (AFP)

On runway 3 at Orly, a few yellow inspection vehicles meet before the airport takes off on Friday. After almost three months of stopping because of the coronavirus, we are busy checking that everything is in order.

"It is a pre-school week, however, the regulatory technical inspections have never stopped, in reality," explains Michel Landelle, head of aeronautical areas at Paris-Orly, the airport south of the capital.

Friday at 6:00 am, the takeoff of a Transavia plane bound for Porto will mark the restart of the second French airport. Air France, the parent company of this low-cost airline, will not yet operate flights from Orly this summer, except to Corsica.

Only medical, cargo or military flights landed or took off from Orly airport, plunged into a long, rather unusual silence.

"There will be a before and after Covid. The recovery will be extremely gradual, it will have nothing to do with what traffic was before the suspension of commercial operations," said Landelle.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday a technical inspection of runway 3, from which the first flight will take off, has been organized.

This monthly review and in detail of the condition of the runway - paintings of the markings on the ground, night beacon lights, often soiled with bird excrement - is in addition to the three regulatory inspections of ten minutes carried out every five hours to ensure that no object is lying around on the runway.

These systematic inspections had been put in place after the Concorde accident in 2000 caused by a titanium strip lost on the runway by an airplane which had taken off shortly before.

- "Extremely progressive" recovery -

"You can find lots of harmless objects: a noise-canceling helmet left on a landing gear which during takeoff can end up on the runway" or a small bolt lost by light vehicles traveling on the runways, explains Bruno The aeronautical safety controller.

Birds hit by planes or more rarely rabbits are among the possible obstacles.

Friday, D-Day, 74 movements, bound for Corsica, countries of the Schengen area and the overseas departments and territories, are planned, against 600 to 650 on average in normal times.

Their number should increase to 173 in early July. But the recovery will be "extremely gradual" because many unknowns remain, particularly concerning the restart of operations towards the Maghreb countries, according to Mr. Landelle.

Another hot spot at the airport is the sorting of luggage. In a huge tangle of 4 km of treadmills, baggage from a ghost flight turns endlessly.

Fifteen fictitious flights were created to detect the slightest malfunction of the ultra-modern facility, opened in April 2019 at the same time as Orly 3, a new 80,000 m2 building which was to help absorb the flow of passengers at a rate of exponential growth.

As for the shops, we are busy restocking the displays. With a few exceptions, such as a self-service candy store, almost all of the airport's 125 outlets will be open.

Faced with the health risk linked to the coronavirus, mobile collection points will be deployed in "duty free" stores, the fabric baskets have been replaced by metal baskets so that they can be disinfected regularly, as are the perfume testers.

© 2020 AFP