The Santa Lucía airport will open in January 2022, six months later than originally anticipated, according to the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena).
President López Obrador has said repeatedly that the new airport will open in June 2021 but Sedena, which is managing the project, said in a document that the facility won’t be ready until the start of the following year.
Construction is expected to start next month and according to the master plan will be completed in 30 months.
Sedena said that because the new airport is being built at an air force base, work must be carried out “with the greatest speed [and] a high degree of coordination and secrecy on the part of the builders so as not to interfere with and hinder the necessary continuity of operations [at the base].”
Three runways – two for commercial use and one for military use – a control tower and a terminal building with touch points for 30 planes are part of the infrastructure to be built during the first phase of the 80-billion-peso (US $4.2-billion) project.
Brigadier General Ricardo Vallejo, head of the military college of engineers, said earlier this year that the airport will be “austere in its design, efficient, functional, sustainable, easy to build . . . safe and emblematic.”
In its first year of operations, the airport will have the capacity to handle 22 million passengers.
To partially fund expansion in subsequent years – the target is to have a capacity of 100 million passengers annually by 2052 – the newspaper El Economista said the government is planning to use resources collected via passenger taxes…
