view the most frequent or shortest journeys in France

PSG coach Christophe Galtier has caused a controversy by trying to justify the use of the plane, rather than the TGV or the ” yachting “, to get to Nantes. The Parisian team has in fact rented a Boeing 737 from fifty-six places to make a round trip Paris (CDG)-Nantes, for its Ligue 1 match.

A journey of forty-two minutes to which are added the transfers to Roissy airport, then the journey from Nantes airport to the Beaujoire stadium. On the way back, the team even had to take a bus to Saint-Nazaire because Nantes airport does not allow departures after midnight, which resulted in a twelve-minute empty journey for the plane of the Lithuanian company KlasJet. A total of at least four hours for the round trip, not counting waiting times, which has few advantages over a train journey (two hours between Paris-Montparnasse and Nantes stations, as the underlined Alain Krakovitch, director of TGV-Intercités).

But the indignation comes mainly from the pollution generated: on this route, the train emits around 100 times less CO₂ in the atmosphere: 134 kg for 56 people in the TGV against more than 13 tonnes for the jet, without even counting the empty flight between Nantes and Saint-Nazaire and the bus journeys.

Read also: Private jets of celebrities: behind the denunciation of pollution, the growing success of “flight tracking”

Beyond this example and others highly publicized during the summer, how are private jets used? For the knowledge, The world has compiled the flights of 235 active jets registered in France and analyzed more than 125,000 flights, including more than 30,000 since the beginning of 2022.

These data are available thanks to ADS-B sensors, mandatory on board any recent aircraft, freely accessible in real time on sites such asadsbexchange.com. These jet trips weigh disproportionately on the environment: according to the NGO Transport & Environment, a jet trip pollutes between five and fourteen times more than an airliner, which itself emits around forty times more than a train.

The vast majority of flights take place between cities with a direct commercial link, or even easily connected by train, with a much lower carbon impact. The most obvious example is that of the Paris-Bordeaux journey, which has been traveled at least 375 times by jet since the start of 2022: while the two cities are linked in two hours ten by TGV, the journey by private plane saves barely an hour and a quarter, multiplying CO emissions by four hundred₂. Among the five most frequently made journeys in France, only Cannes, a city very popular with private travel enthusiasts, is not accessible from Paris by plane. However, a direct flight to Nice and a car journey of about forty-five minutes saves three-quarters of CO2 emissions.₂.

In May, Elon Musk was pin for a journey of just nine minutes between San Francisco and San José. The CEO of Tesla is not alone in making trips that could easily be made by (electric) car. Since 1^er January, more than 730 domestic flights in mainland France lasted less than thirty minutes. Avignon-Montpellier is one hour and fifteen minutes by car and about twenty-four minutes by jet, three times faster for at least five times more emissions, yet this flight has been made more than one hundred and fifty times since the beginning of the year.

The table below compiles the shortest flights flown repeatedly (i.e. at least more than once) in 2022. CO emissions₂ are largely underestimated here, because the European Environment Agency’s calculator was not designed for such short flights, yet the take-off and landing phases are the most fuel-intensive.