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Charles de Gaulle airport (CDG/LFPG) in Paris had great expansion in the new century, including new runways and terminal 2 buildings.

What was the airport layout before the great expansion?

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  • $\begingroup$ CDG had Terminal 1 only from its inauguration (1974) until Terminal T2A/T2B were opened in 1982, T2C/T2D/T3 around 1990, T2E/T2F/T2G after 2000. The 4th runway entered service in 1998. See this current map. $\endgroup$ – mins Sep 23 '15 at 20:29
  • $\begingroup$ With the edit in your question, the answer is easier, before T2 there was only T1: During construction and completed. $\endgroup$ – mins Sep 24 '15 at 6:34
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You will hardly find anything complete on the web as :

  • at the time of the expansion a bunch of years ago, you didn't have that much computer assisted medias to produce representative documents.
  • most accurate documents are inside old books you can only access at specialized libraries, rare copies owned privately or museums.
  • Because Charles de Gaulle is a french airport, you'll likely to find what you're looking for in french !

I do have an Air France magazine with Charles de Gaulle history til 2002, and another dedicated to the Terminal 2F extension, but because those are copyrighted materials, I can't post them here. Sorry.

Though, you can head to the following sites :

http://www.entrevoisins.org/paris-charles-de-gaulle-de-1945-1975.aspx (video - if you don't mind quality of the era)

http://www.aeroportsdeparis.fr/groupe/presse/40-ans-paris-cdg/photographies (a couple pictures) http://airinfo.org/2014/03/07/paris-charles-de-gaulle-fete-ses-40-ans-video-photos/ (dedicated copy of the above)

http://www.goussainlivres.com/librairie/librairie/aeroport-roissy-charles-de-gaulle=198.html (one small cropped overview from a book - bear in mind that most relevant structures of the airport is inside that picture and everything around are empty areas)

Basically, you only had the Terminal 1, and one runway. Airport name was "Paris Nord" before becoming "Roissy-en-France", then finally called "Charles de Gaulle" just before inauguration (8 of March, 1974). And initial planned extensions were identical copies of the Terminal 1 all other the place including where T2 and T3 are today. Sorry, I can't post a plan from the Air France book, but it's rather similar to the one you can spot in the video above.

There are also rare documents you could retrieve from old magazines issued at the time (Air & Cosmos to name the one I know of) or magazines like EntreVoisins (used to collect them at Maison de l'Environnement, Athis-Mons, near Delta Museum) which sometimes raises issues about noise pollution from Paris Airport platforms (comparative maps of the airport through the years)

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  • $\begingroup$ Sorry, I was reffering to "Maison de l'Environnement", not Orly Airport. But further searches lead me to realize the museum (kind of) I'm talking about isn't closed by now. I'm surely confusing Maison de l'Environnement with something else near Orly related to aviation that has either closed or ceased something important. Post edited. Thanks for the notification. $\endgroup$ – Karl Stephen Sep 23 '15 at 20:15
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    $\begingroup$ There was the delta museum (delta wing aircrafts, but not only) with a Concorde prototype, a Caravelle. Currently closed. Is that what you remember? $\endgroup$ – mins Sep 23 '15 at 20:42
  • $\begingroup$ @mins. I thought of it aswell, as you walk right in front of after taking the bus from Paris to get at Maison de l'Environnement, but the dates doesn't match. I left Paris in late 2007 and ceased to go to the M.de.L'E less than a couple years before. I'll edit again and remove the vague assumption. Thanks $\endgroup$ – Karl Stephen Sep 24 '15 at 6:19
  • $\begingroup$ Before Edit : I were used to collect the EntreVoisins magazine each month at "Maison de l'Environnement" (which appears to have ceased issuing some copies of the magazine around 2006 or 2007, then resumed ?), south of Orly Airport. Those magazines were (are) used to bring back from history hundreds of such documents, and I vaguely remember a few with CDG airport maps in the past (noises pollutions were one frequent topic of the issues, and there were comparisons through the years) But I sadly thrown all of them to the bin when I leaved France, knowing no one willing to get the copies. :/ $\endgroup$ – Karl Stephen Sep 24 '15 at 6:28

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