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Rennes-Saint-Jacques Airport (LFRN/RNS) lies at Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande, some six kilometres southwest of Rennes in Brittany, and combines a full-length instrument runway with a lighter secondary strip. Its history stretches back to the early 1930s and includes a period as a Luftwaffe airfield and later a USAAF combat base during the 1944 liberation of France, making it a field of real historical depth for the visiting simulator pilot.
Rennes-Saint-Jacques Airport serves the Breton city of Rennes from a site at Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande, about six kilometres to the southwest. It is a minor international field handling scheduled and business traffic, and for the VFR or IFR visitor in a simulator it offers an interesting mix of a long, ILS-equipped main runway alongside a much shorter secondary runway, plus a genuinely storied wartime past.
The airport sits at 48.0719N, 1.7322W at an elevation of 105 feet, immediately southwest of the city of Rennes in the Ille-et-Vilaine department of Brittany, France. It carries the IATA code RNS alongside its ICAO identifier LFRN.
The airport has two physical runways. The main runway, 10/28, is a hard-surfaced, lit runway of 6629 feet in the 10 direction and 6871 feet in the 28 direction, with an ILS serving runway 28, making it suitable for medium-range jet and turboprop traffic. A secondary hard-surfaced runway, 14/32, is 2800 feet long and is not lit, better suited to light aircraft.
Radio services are provided under the callsign Rennes on the following frequencies: Rennes APP on 124.9 MHz and 134 MHz, Rennes ATIS on 136.4 MHz, Rennes GND on 121.725 MHz, and Rennes TWR on 120.5 MHz. Runway 28 is equipped with an ILS for instrument approaches.
The site was developed from 1931, when a 380,000 square metre plot at Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande was acquired to build a proper airport for Rennes, replacing an earlier landing ground on a hippodrome at Gayeulles to the northeast of the city. The airport was officially opened on 28 July 1933 by Pierre Cot. Following the Battle of France, German forces seized the airfield in June 1940 and used it as a Luftwaffe base throughout the occupation, hosting fighter and bomber units including Jagdgeschwader 53, Kampfgeschwader 27, Kampfgeschwader 26, Kampfgeschwader 77, Schnellkampfgeschwader 10 and Jagdgeschwader 11, several of which took part in operations over England during the Battle of Britain and subsequent night raids. The airfield was attacked repeatedly by Allied forces, including an Eighth Air Force B-17 raid on 9 January 1944 and multiple B-26 Marauder strikes by the 323d Bombardment Group during the Normandy campaign, with escorting and sweeping fighters from the Ninth and Eighth Air Forces also engaging targets there. Allied ground forces liberated the airfield around 7 August 1944, after which the USAAF's 820th Engineer Aviation Battalion cleared mines and wreckage and the field was redesignated Advanced Landing Ground A-27. Under American control it hosted the 362d Fighter Group flying P-47 Thunderbolts and the 10th Reconnaissance Group, and became headquarters of IX Air Defense Command from 25 August 1944, before being used as a supply and maintenance depot and returned to French civil control on 30 November 1944. Some wartime bomb craters remain visible in grassy areas north of the main runway.
The airport is operated by the Rennes Chamber of Commerce and Industry and today functions as a minor international airport. Its main ILS-equipped runway can handle aircraft of up to around 180 passengers and is capable of accommodating cargo types such as the Boeing 757 and 767, the Airbus A310 and the Ilyushin Il-76, while the secondary paved runway is used mainly by light business and leisure aircraft.
