Toulouse; Saturday, 26 March, 2022

I had to be up and out of the hotel early to get the tram out into the town of Blagnac, north of Toulouse and home to not just it’s airport, but also one of the main hubs of aviation on the planet. This is the location where aviation first started in France and today it’s also the headquarters for Airbus as well as being home to the final assembly line for a number of their planes.

A lot of the history of flight and the importance of Toulouse is told in the Aeroscopia museum, but the museum also has occasional tours that you can book on, and so it was that before 9am I was outside the museum waiting for the tour guide to collect us for a tour round the Airbus plant.

The two hour tour starts by heading over to the paint shop for the A330, before going for a quick hunt around the vast complex in search of some of the Beluga and Beluga XL planes, used by Airbus to help ferry components such as wings and chunks of fuselage around between their various manufacturing sites across France, Germany, Spain and The UK. From there it was a drive over to the Final Assembly Line for the A350 where we were able to get out of the bus and climb up to a viewing platform at tail fin hight to look over the factory floor. It being a Saturday it was relatively quiet, but it was still amazing to see the scale and size of the operation, with this mammoth building housing just three planes being worked on at the time of visiting.

After taking in the A350 FAL we headed back onto the bus to go out to the Delivery Acceptance area, this is the place where the airlines come with their credit cards to pick up the keys to their new planes and part with the final payment on them. From there the bus returned back to the museum, via the end of Toulouse’s super long runway – built so that all new planes can be tested to see that they can reject a take-off if needed – and back to the museum for a tour inside the A400M military aircraft that is normally only visible from the outside.

After the Airbus tour there was time to head into the museum and have a look around the exhibits inside and parked out on their show lot. The museum houses a number of the test planes that were used to prove the design with the test Concorde and test A300 located inside the museum, and the gargantuan A380 test aircraft parked up outside. In all cases you can climb on board and see how the planes look – complete with the cockpits, test equipment and even parts of the interior exposed to show how the planes are put together.

Having spent quite a bit of time out at the museum I caught the tram back into town to the end of the line at the Place of Justice and then walked up to the Muséum de Toulouse, the city’s Natural History and Geology museum. The museum also houses a small botanical gardens which I also took the time to look around.

From the museums I had a wander back across town and down to the Pont Neuf – this is the oldest surviving of the bridges crossing The Garonne in the city and sits close to a bend in the river from where there are stunning views across the buildings lining the banks. I spent quite a bit of time taking in the views before catching the bus back across town to the hotel.

I freshened up in the hotel before heading out for a quick dinner in town and then back to my room and welcoming bed.