Will López Obrador’s new Mexico City airport take off?

Mexico City’s new airport will boast a palaeontology museum, a housing complex for the military and a terminal with lucha libre-themed bathrooms. What is not yet clear is how many passengers will choose to use it. Felipe Ángeles International Airport, which is about 40 kilometres from the city centre, will offer just seven passenger routes when it opens on Monday. Airline industry experts said crucial access infrastructure and more commercial incentives were still missing. The only international flight from Felipe Ángeles will be with Venezuela’s state carrier Conviasa to Caracas. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Friday that he spoke to executives at US airline Delta, which owns a stake in national flag carrier Aeromexico, and that it was considering whether to add flights. Delta declined to comment. The Mexican capital — with a metro area home to more than 20mn people — has experienced a decades-long aviation headache as policymakers failed to increase capacity. One of López Obrador’s first acts as president was to scrap a partly-built $13b Norman Foster-designed airport he said was mired in corruption, a move that rattled investors and signalled that his radical promises were not just campaign trail rhetoric. López Obrador instead proceeded with the more modest Felipe Ángeles project, named after a revolutionary general. Like his other infrastructure plans, it was built by the military. After two and a half years of construction local media estimates the building will cost about 115b pesos ($5.6b).  “This project will benefit a lot of people, not just those that live in Las Lomas,” López Obrador said on Friday, referring to a high-income neighbourhood in the capital. “Little by little [the airlines] will come around and they will take all the spaces in the new airport.” <br/>