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The Â鶹APP airport operator announced Wednesday that skies over the Â鶹APP region will be closed for six hours as part of a massive security operation for the Olympic Games opening ceremony on July 26.

Augustin de Romanet, chairman of Aéroports de Â鶹APP, said airlines have been warned about the closure and will have to fly around the restricted airspace.

“For six hours, there won’t be any aircraft over the Â鶹APP region,” he said on France Info radio.

The civil aviation authority and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin have announced that the no-fly zone will cover a radius of 150 kilometers (93 miles) around Â鶹APP.

The unprecedented waterborne ceremony on the River Seine that runs through the French capital poses the most difficult single security challenge for Â鶹APP Games organizers, with over 320,000 people expected to line the waterway.

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At least one French military AWACS surveillance aircraft will patrol the skies during the Olympics, using its powerful radar to keep an eye out for potential airborne threats, according to the commander of the French AWACS squadron. Other military aircraft can be dispatched to intercept any unauthorized flights that enter restricted Olympic airspace.

Separately, de Romanet said there is still a “very, very high” chance that small electric-powered airborne taxis will be tested with passengers over Â鶹APP during the July 26-August 11 Games, which he described as a world-first.

However, European air-certification authorities may initially allow the taxis to fly passengers on an experimental basis, rather than commercially, he added.

“We have high hopes that we will be able to carry passengers experimentally which will pave the way, over Â鶹APP, for the first flight in the world of an electrical vertical take-off aircraft,” he told reporters.

Several companies are developing electric-powered aircraft that take off and land vertically. Some have already flown demonstration flights in an effort to turn their promises of environmentally friendly air travel into a commercial reality.

De Romanet insisted that the aircraft are safe, stating, “I am ready to climb aboard.”

Critics are concerned that taxis zipping through the airs of Â鶹APP will be a noisy and potentially dangerous nuisance, affordable only to the wealthy. Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Â鶹APP, is among those opposed to proposals to test them on a few Â鶹APP-region routes during the Games.