Mexican airline Aeroméxico plans to significantly increase flights from Mexico City’s Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA), allowing it to grow its total operations at the airport by 40%.

Which flights will move to AIFA and when?

Starting Oct. 5, the airline will move seven weekly flights to Colima and 14 to Durango from the Mexico City International Airport (AICM) to AIFA. It will also add two new routes to León and Aguascalientes, each with seven flights a week.

This will bring Aeroméxico’s total destinations served from AIFA to 13 – including Acapulco, Cancún, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Mérida, Oaxaca, Puerto Vallarta, Veracruz and an international route to Houston, Texas. 

The change will increase capacity from 88,120 to 120,000 seats per month, allowing the airline to capitalize on growing demand for flights in the region.

A sign of more growth to come for AIFA

This demand is expected to increase since the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reinstated Mexico’s Category 1 aviation safety rating last Thursday. The rating was downgraded to Category 2 in May 2021, after Mexico was found not to meet safety standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

As a result of the downgrade, Mexico had been unable to add new routes to the United States and U.S. airlines were barred from selling seats on flights operated by Mexican airlines for the last two years, inhibiting growth at AIFA. 

Built on the site of the Santa Lucía air base north of Mexico City, AIFA opened in March 2022. One of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s signature projects, it was built to relieve pressure on AICM, which is the nation’s busiest airport, but also has suffered from failing infrastructure and saturation.  

The transfer of flights to AIFA has been slower than hoped. Last week, the federal government announced that it will postpone until January 2024 a decree passed in August to reduce operations in the AICM from 52 to 43 per hour over the winter season. However, the new military-run Mexicana airline is expected to begin operations out of AIFA later this year, flying to 20 national destinations, and the airport did see its best month of traffic yet in July, serving over 250,000 passengers.

With reports from Infobae, Aviation Source News and Forbes