“It seemed like a mission impossible, but it isn’t,” one of them said. With nearly 30 days to the opening, the soldiers proudly declared the mission complete.
Away from the violence, the fight against drug trafficking and their other jobs, the soldiers – engineers and architects in army green – began building the airport on April 29, 2019. The airport became the first in a series of large-scale construction projects to be undertaken by the armed forces. He wanted financing for the construction to come out of the national budget – instead of relying on debt – and he tasked the armed forces with building the airport.īefore AIFA, soldiers in Mexico had only ever built schools, hospitals and homes. But in 2018, when the work was 30% completed, the current Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, pulled the plug and proposed the airport be built on part of the land that makes up the Santa Lucía Air Force Base. To address this issue, the government of former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto announced the construction of a new airport in Texcoco, 25 kilometers from the capital, which was expected to cost $13 billion. The coronavirus pandemic and the suspension of Interjet operations in 2020 gave the airport some breathing space, but as activity returns to normal, pressure is inevitable. In 2019, AICM had already exceeded the recommended security levels, with 50 million travelers recorded. AIFA’s job is to ease the pressure on Mexico City International Airport (AICM), which received 36 million passengers in 2021. Operations at AIFA will kick off with eight national flights, with passengers from the cities of Monterrey, Guadalajara, Cancún and Tijuana (both arrivals and departures), as well as two international freight operations from the United States. Next to the facility is the Santa Lucía Air Force Base. The visibility was poor, but the main elements of AIFA could be seen: a control tower, two runways for civilian flights and one for military operations, a terminal, a hotel, a parking station, a loading station and fuel tanks. Others were laying down the ground markings on the runway. In early February, workers were still putting up the passenger terminal and building the pathways to get there.
0 kommentar(er)
