Air Inter long had an interesting little scissors hub at Lyon, with twice-daily flights meeting up from the full set of French provincial cities, enabling trips like Bordeaux to Strasbourg, or Marseilles to Lille, without going through Paris, although that was another option. Some were on smaller aircraft like the Nord 262, which was almost built just for this task. All lost nowadays. Some of the aircraft just seemed to do a morning and evening round trip there, standing idle for the rest of the day as worthwhile business was just not there. It worked very well, if your schedule fitted with theirs.
Interestingly, this mirrored a long tradition of the French railways, which had major long distance services radiating from Paris just a couple of times a day, sometimes even just one daytime and one overnight train, each huge trains of say 15 cars or more, and at busy times duplicated by another running just behind - then nothing for the rest of the day. It's somewhat changed now, but I was at the Paris Gare de Lyon a few years ago one summer weekend afternoon (ironically, given @
jlemon 's notes above, it was the day of the end of the Tour de France just along the street), and one of the TGV trains arrived from the Riviera, double deck trains, and two joined together, full up and well over 1,000 passengers getting out. Five minutes later a duplicate, also two double deckers joined, arrived from the same place, with another 1,500 or so passengers. The pandemoneum for the next half hour at the Metro entrance and the taxi stand was something to see. Only in France !
You see, it's still like the all-time classic French holiday film "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday", from about 1950. I was reminded of this film multiple times in our Jersey sojourn. Have a look at the complete film if you can. Here's the opening shot (2 minutes) at the railway station. I understand that Paris Orly airport on summer Saturday mornings, with Air France and Easyjet to the South of France, is still much the same
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