Santa Lucia Deadline Looms Large Over 2022

Mexico City’s new Felipe Ángeles International Airport in Santa Lucia is scheduled to be inaugurated in 81 days, but a number of key questions concerning the airport’s daily operations remain to be answered.

The fact that the official inauguration of the airport, which was long ago established to be March 23, 2022, will be met was confirmed by Viva Aerobús and their claim that a flight headed to Guadalajara will indeed be departing from Santa Lucía on that day at 11:30 a.m. No other flights are programmed to arrive or depart at this time. The airport’s construction process currently reports a progress rate of 83.1 percent, according to the latest official release. An onsite report from Publimetro confirmed that the airport’s terminal and its two runways are all indeed completed. However, the report also claims that the site is almost completely covered in dust clouds due to the overwhelming presence of heavy construction machinery, despite claims from SEDENA that the work being done now only consists of cleanups and IT installations. The presence of dust clouds generates poor visibility conditions. This dust is also caused by the location’s active wind conditions, which have been reported on before but have yet to damage the airport’s facilities. 

The travel time from Mexico City to Santa Lucía is currently confirmed to hover above an hour and 20 minutes, starting from the northern Indios Verdes subway station. Construction of various road networks surrounding the airport are also ongoing; they are meant to minimize traffic bottlenecks for arriving and departing passengers. So far, the only public transportation option available to reach the airport by the time of its inauguration will be Line 1 of the Mexibús, which currently runs from Ciudad Azteca to Ojo de Agua but will be expanded to reach Santa Lucia by March.   

The first users of this airport can expect to enter a building with state-of-the-art technology but no commercial spaces, since no contracts for the occupation of these spaces has been granted to any company or individual, reports El Sol de México. 253 companies have signed letters of interest and intent so far, but the contracting process is yet to advance past that point. SEDENA has explained that all applying companies must pass through a number of regulatory evaluations before being approved for commercial space use.