Traffic in France is heavily concentrated: Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) alone handles about 70.3 million passengers a year, roughly 83% of the 85 million across the 4 airports listed here. That pattern is typical of a country with one dominant hub carrier feeding a single gateway.
Between them these airports operate 10 runways serving 4 cities, all on a single national clock. Every airport below links to a live map of aircraft observed within available ADS-B coverage around the field.
The next airport in the ranking is Nice Cote d'Azur Airport (NCE) at about 14.5 million passengers. The gap to CDG is 55.8 million, while the three busiest airports account for roughly 100% of traffic represented by this list. Most listed traffic is therefore concentrated at the top of the network.
The airports are spread across roughly 5 degrees of latitude and 5 degrees of longitude. The network is geographically compact enough that most domestic sectors remain comparatively short. Field elevations vary less dramatically than they do in the world's mountain-airport networks. The average across this selected set is 2.5 runways per airport.
Read airport by airport, the selected France network is not interchangeable: Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) has 4 runways and about 70.3 million annual passengers, Nice Cote d'Azur Airport (NCE) has 2 runways and about 14.5 million annual passengers, Lyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS) has 2 runways and no comparable traffic figure and EuroAirport Basel, mulhouse, freiburg (BSL) has 2 runways and no comparable traffic figure. Those differences matter when comparing a live map. A larger passenger total indicates schedule scale, while runway count describes physical layout; neither number by itself proves how delayed, connected or operationally efficient an airport will be on a particular day.
With 4 gateways in this data cut, the France hierarchy is readable directly: CDG contributes 83% of the represented passenger total, NCE contributes 17% of the represented passenger total, LYS contributes 0% of the represented passenger total and BSL contributes 0% of the represented passenger total. That makes CDG the first gateway here without reducing NCE to a minor field, since its traffic is about 21% of CDG's.
The physical ranking differs from the traffic ranking: CDG has 4 listed runways, NCE has 2 listed runways, LYS has 2 listed runways and BSL has 2 listed runways. BSL is the highest of the group at 885 ft, against 12 ft at NCE. Those facts describe layout and setting, not a live capacity forecast; weather, active runway configuration and traffic flow still decide what a viewer sees on the map at a given hour.