The complications that the construction of a new airport at the Santa Lucía military base would generate in the operations of the Mexico City International Airport (AICM) have been warned since 2018. Then the research center specialized in aviation issues Miter warned that the The operation of both airports would require the creation of an “extremely complex” airspace.
The warning emerged in November 2018, weeks after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador confirmed the cancellation of the New Mexico International Airport (NAIM) and the construction of another at the Santa Lucía military base.
“Now there is talk of operating a greater volume of air traffic in three relatively close airports (AICM, Toluca and Santa Lucía), not two (Toluca and NAIM), for which Miter recommends even more forcefully that the airspace be studied and management before undertaking works in Santa Lucía. It would be unfortunate to verify that the operation of the three airports results in a ‘bottleneck’ of air traffic without mitigation”, warned four years ago the company, which also advises the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United States.
The new Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA) was inaugurated on March 21. Two months earlier, in January, the International Aeronautical Association IATA supported the redesign of the airspace for the operation of the capital’s airport system that would integrate the operation of the three airports, the new one in Santa Lucía, the AICM and the one in Toluca, and qualified it as “very responsible”.
But recently the National Union of Air Traffic Controllers ( Sinacta ) reported that between December 2021 and March of this year, they have been registered at least due to various causes, among which the changes in the airspace from its reconfiguration influence. and the working conditions of the personnel in charge of traffic management.
The most recent incident occurred on May 6 between one of the runways of the Mexico City International Airport when the aircraft that came from Mazatlán, Sinaloa, received permission from the controller to land, while another aircraft was waiting to take off to Guatemala.
Among the problems pointed out by Miter in 2018 was the fact that, given the abrupt orography of CDMX, the operating system of the three airports had to be based on the airspace and not on the design of the runways. “The idea that adding runways automatically equates to increased capacity, regardless of runway geometry (“configuration”), obstacles, airspace and real-time simulations, is wrong.”
