Mexico City ponders a second airport, again

Mexico City International Airport's Director General Hector Velazquez, speaking at an event last week in Mexico organised by IATA and Latin American airline association ALTA, stated that in his opinion it is necessary to construct a second airport in Mexico City as current operations at the existing one are "saturated". The original proposal dates back to the late 1990s but ran into political difficulties.

The scale of Mexican aviation is considerable. It has the second largest share of available airline seat capacity in Latin America, after Brazil. But the Mexican industry has not growing nearly as fast as Brazil or other major emerging markets. In fact the Mexican market has shrunk in size in recent years.

Domestic passenger traffic in Mexico has decreased by 8% over the last four years from 27.6 million passengers in 2008 to 25.5 million passengers in 2011 while international traffic has dropped during this period by 1% from 25.7 million passengers in 2008 to 25.3 million passengers in 2011. As the most popular airport in Mexico, Mexico City International was still able to grow its traffic between 2008 and 2011 but only by a paltry 0.6% from 26.2 million passengers in 2008 to 26.4 million passengers in 2011.