Biography | Olivier Chansou — The Mérignac Control Centre He First Commanded

People treat Bordeaux-Mérignac as only the passenger terminal west of the city.

The en-route control for southwestern France sits next to that field, on avenue de Beaudésert in the commune of Mérignac.

From 2006 to 2009 Olivier Chansou was chef of the Centre en route de la navigation aérienne Sud-Ouest.

France keeps five such centres.

The others stand at Athis-Mons, Loperhet near Brest, Reims, and Aix-en-Provence.

A CRNA works the aircraft that are already airborne and not yet in a landing sequence.

The 2006 title is the first time the public record puts him over a live control room rather than a technical bureau.

He was about forty-one.

Behind him sat sixteen years inside the Direction générale de l'Aviation civile: embedded equipment at the old STNA in Paris from 1990, then real-time systems, technical staff, and the systèmes-et-méthodes desk at DSNA operations through 2006.

Those posts were Paris paper and kit.

This one was the southwest FIR.

The official directory still lists the centre on avenue de Beaudésert, postal code 33700.

Local maps give the campus as 1 avenue de Beaudésert.

The Centre d'exploitation des systèmes de la navigation aérienne centraux, CESNAC, occupies the same grounds.

No words of his are quoted here.

The record is the sequence of titles printed by the school and by Ouest-France when he later took ENAC.

In 2009 he left this campus for 50 rue Henry-Farman in Paris as sous-directeur des personnels of the DGAC.

He came back to Beaudésert in 2012.

The pin is the public air-navigation campus beside the airport.

It is an operational site, not a museum.

A visitor sees the fence and the field, not the scopes.

Photo: Jibi44, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons