عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
Varieties

Air Taxis Failed to Get Certified for the Paris Olympics

A Volocity air taxi flies during a demonstration flight at Paris Bourget Airport on June 20, 2023. (Photo by Geoffroy VAN DER HASSELT / AFP)
A Volocity air taxi flies during a demonstration flight at Paris Bourget Airport on June 20, 2023. (Photo by Geoffroy VAN DER HASSELT / AFP)
TT
TT

Air Taxis Failed to Get Certified for the Paris Olympics

A Volocity air taxi flies during a demonstration flight at Paris Bourget Airport on June 20, 2023. (Photo by Geoffroy VAN DER HASSELT / AFP)
A Volocity air taxi flies during a demonstration flight at Paris Bourget Airport on June 20, 2023. (Photo by Geoffroy VAN DER HASSELT / AFP)

It was a tantalizing vision: autonomous flying taxis zipping spectators around the Paris Olympics, their electric engines humming softly over the cityscape, ushering in a new era in public transport.

Certification delays dashed that dream. But the backers of the Volocopter aircraft that was meant to ferry Olympic fans aren’t giving up. They carried out a test flight Sunday, marking the last day of the 2024 Olympics with a sunrise demonstration over the resplendent grounds of the Versailles palace, The AP reported.

The craft carried baggage, but no people, when it took off from the gardens of Versailles, from where the first hot-air balloon took flight in 1783.

The Paris region had planned for a small fleet of pilot-less air taxis for the Olympics, operated by Germany’s Volocopter and the Paris airport authority ADP.

Five Olympic routes were planned, including one landing on a platform on the Seine River -- and Volocopter CEO Dirk Hoke hoped that French President Emmanuel Macron would be his first passenger.

But ADP’s CEO Augustin de Romanet said Thursday that it had failed to win certification from Europe’s air safety agency in time for the Games.

Manufacturers of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft — or eVTOL – remain confident that they’re a wave of the future. Companies around the world are trying to get their models authorized for flight.

Volocopter now hopes to get permission to carry passengers over Paris for the city’s next major event: the reopening of fire-ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral in December.

And rivals are aiming to make the vision of Olympic spectators hopping around venues in autonomous flying machines a reality the next Summer Games — in Los Angeles in 2028.

Most Viewed

 
 
Varieties

Chili Paste Heats Up Dishes at Northeastern Tunisia’s Harissa Festival

Chahida Boufaied, owner of Dar Chahida Lel Oula, prepares the Harissa in her house in Nabeul, Tunisia, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ons Abid)
Chahida Boufaied, owner of Dar Chahida Lel Oula, prepares the Harissa in her house in Nabeul, Tunisia, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ons Abid)
TT
TT

Chili Paste Heats Up Dishes at Northeastern Tunisia’s Harissa Festival

Chahida Boufaied, owner of Dar Chahida Lel Oula, prepares the Harissa in her house in Nabeul, Tunisia, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ons Abid)
Chahida Boufaied, owner of Dar Chahida Lel Oula, prepares the Harissa in her house in Nabeul, Tunisia, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ons Abid)

For years, Tunisians have been picking bright red peppers, combining them with garlic, vinegar and spices and turning them into a saucy spread called harissa. The condiment is a national staple and pastime, found in homes, restaurants and food stalls throughout the coastal North African nation.

Brick-red, spicy and tangy, it can be scooped up on bread drizzled with olive oil or dabbed onto plates of eggs, fish, stews or sandwiches. Harissa can be sprinkled atop merguez sausages, smeared on savory pastries called brik or sandwiches called fricassées, The Associated Press reported.
In Nabeul, the largest city in Tunisia’s harissa-producing Cap Bon region, local chef and harissa specialist Chahida Boufayed called it “essential to Tunisian cuisine.”
“Harissa is a love story,” she said at a festival held in honor of the chili paste sauce in the northeastern Tunisian city of Nabeul earlier this month. “I don’t make it for the money.”
Aficionados from across Tunisia and the world converged on the 43-year-old mother’s stand to try her recipe. Surrounded by strings of drying baklouti red peppers, she described how she grows her vegetables and blends them with spices to make harissa.
The region’s annual harissa festival has grown in the two-plus years since the United Nations cultural organization, UNESCO, recognized the sauce on a list of items of intangible cultural heritage, said Zouheir Belamin, the president of the association behind the event, a Nabeul-based preservation group. He said its growing prominence worldwide was attracting new tourists to Tunisia, specifically to Nabeul.
UNESCO in 2022 called harissa an integral part of domestic provisions and the daily culinary and food traditions of Tunisian society, adding it to a list of traditions and practices that mark intangible cultural heritage.
Already popular across North Africa as well as in France, the condiment is gaining popularity throughout the world from the United States to China.
Seen as sriracha’s North African cousin, harissa is typically prepared by women who sun-dry harvested red peppers and then deseed, wash and ground them. Its name comes from “haras” – the Arabic verb for “to crush” – because of the next stage in the process.
The finished peppers are combined it with a mixture of garlic cloves, vinegar, salt, olive oil and spices in a mortar and pestle to make a fragrant blend. Variants on display at Nabeul’s Jan. 3-5 festival used cumin, coriander and different spice blends or types of peppers, including smoked ones, to create pastes ranging in color from burgundy to crimson.
“Making harissa is an art. If you master it, you can create wonders,” Boufayed said.