Biography | Anne Rigail — The Le Bourget Show Grounds in Her First Summer as Chief

People treat the Paris Air Show as a manufacturers' fair.

For a new Air France chief it is also a workplace in public.

The 53rd International Paris Air Show ran at the Le Bourget exhibition grounds from 17 to 23 June 2019.

Trade days came first. The public walked the same grass from 21 June.

Libération published a long profile of Rigail on 18 June 2019, in the middle of that week.

The paper's own timeline put the salon on her 2019 line, six months after the board vote.

She had taken the chief's chair on 17 December 2018.

The show sits on the old Paris airport, the field the company itself had used before Orly and Roissy took the long-haul work.

In 2019 the work in front of her was not a display aircraft.

It was pay talks with pilots, a customer product she had already owned, and a group strategy written in Amsterdam as much as in Tremblay.

The grounds are still used every odd-numbered year.

The Musée de l'Air stands next door.

A visitor in a non-show year will find the museum and the empty parking aprons, not the chalets.

The date that belongs on this pin is the show month, not a later ceremony in another building.

Photo: Matti Blume, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons