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 Travel & Outdoors | June 2007 
Crowded Skies Stressing Mexico City's Airport
 Chris Hawley - azcentral.com
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| | Mexico City International Airport (GeoEye) |
Mexico City - It was rush hour in the skies above the world's second-biggest city, and two of the airliners cutting through the smog were getting uncomfortably close.
"This one's not going to make it," an air-traffic controller in the Mexico City airport tower muttered as a silver and blue Boeing 737 bore down on a turboprop that had just landed.
"Aeromexico 687, go around," he ordered, and the Boeing, a flight from Chicago, gunned its engines just 200 feet above the ground and shot back into the air.
"That's pretty common," Jose Alfredo Covarrubias, legal affairs director for Mexico's air-traffic controllers union, said as he watched the plane depart on another 15-minute loop around Mexico City. "This airport is just overloaded."
As air traffic to the Mexican capital booms, the city's Benito Juarez International Airport is bursting at the seams, pilots and air-traffic controllers warn. During peak periods, as many as 62 planes take off and land per hour, the controllers union says, eight more than the airport's official capacity of 54 an hour.
That puts air travel in the same category as Mexico City's waterlines, sewers and roads, which are straining to serve 20 million residents.
Both Aeromexico and Mexicana have begun non-stop flights between Phoenix and Mexico City in the past year. In all, about 763,000 Americans fly into the Mexico City airport every year.
At the same time, a host of discount airlines - Interjet, Volaris, Click and others - have sprung up in Mexico in the past three years. Although many of the discount carriers use other airports, their low fares are cutting into the markets served by long-distance buses and getting more Mexicans hooked on air travel.
Departures and arrivals at Mexico City's airport have increased 20 percent since 2001, to nearly 356,000 a year. If the growth continues, travelers could begin to see serious delays, experts say.
Growing pains
Mexico City has swelled to become the second-largest metropolis in the world after Tokyo, but its air transportation system has failed to keep pace because of difficult geography, bad planning, political infighting and a riot in 2002 that quashed plans for a new airport.
The Mexico City airport was built in 1929, making it one of the oldest in the Americas. Among the airport's handicaps:
• Its two parallel runways were built only 990 feet apart. That is too close to be used simultaneously, meaning the airport effectively has only one runway.
Because of the limitations, the airport exceeds its theoretical capacity of 54 planes an hour about seven hours of every day, said Agustin Arellano, head of the Mexican Airspace Navigation Service.
• Mexico City's location in a U-shaped valley limits how many planes can line up for a landing at the same time, even if there were more runways, said Jorge Sunderland, a spokesman for the Aviation Pilots Labor Association, Mexico's main pilots union.
• There is a shortage of air-traffic controllers. On any given weekday, more than 13 percent of controllers are working overtime, Arellano said. Furthermore, 92 of the country's 780 air-traffic controllers will be eligible for retirement next year, while the country's school for controllers will graduate only 32 new ones.
Airport riots
In 2002, then-President Vicente Fox had planned to build a new, six-runway, $2.3 billion airport in the barrens of Texcoco, northeast of the city. Landowners revolted at the price the government was offering for the land: about 70 cents per square yard.
Machete-wielding residents seized control of a nearby town, taking 19 public officials hostage, torching cars and threatening to blow up gasoline tankers. The Fox administration backed down, saying it would try to improve the existing airport, instead.
"It is the safest airport in Latin America," said Rodolfo Mendoza, a spokesman for Airports and Auxiliary Services, the agency that runs the airport.
Operating at or slightly above capacity doesn't necessarily mean an airport is dangerous, analysts say.
A 2004 Federal Aviation Administration study found that several U.S. airports, including Atlanta's Hartsfield, Chicago's O'Hare, La Guardia in New York, and Newark Liberty in New Jersey, frequently exceed their calculated capacity during peak hours.
"It's something that happens frequently (in Mexico City), but it's not something catastrophic," said Gilberto López, head of Mexico's General Directorate of Civil Aviation, the equivalent of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
So far, Mexico City has managed its delays well. In 2005, the last year for which data is available, about 212 of the airport's 840 daily flights were delayed, according to the government.
That is a 75 percent on-time rate, about comparable to the U.S. average, which hovered around 72 percent for arrivals and 79 percent for departures as of April.
The airport also has a good safety record. In 2004, an Aerocalifornia DC-9 ran off the end of a runway, injuring one passenger. But the airport's last major accident was in 1979, when a Western Airlines DC-10 landed on the wrong runway and hit a construction vehicle, killing 72 passengers.
The government is improving the nearby Toluca and Cuernavaca airports in an attempt to relieve the Mexico City airport. Getting to those airports involves a two-hour drive through brutal traffic and over the mountains, and airlines and passengers have been reluctant to make the trek.
A new terminal, which is scheduled to open in October, will help with congestion by adding 23 jetways, as well as some new taxiways.
The improvements will increase the airport's flight capacity by only 10 percent. But the jetways and bigger platforms should encourage airlines to fly bigger planes into the airport, increasing the number of passengers without the need to add more flights, López said.
The terminal will also improve safety because planes will no longer have to cross runways to get to a terminal, said Germán Guzmán, an airport spokesman.
Reach the reporter at chris.hawley@arizonarepublic.com. |
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