New, larger airport planned for Mexico City

MEXICO CITY – President Enrique Pena Nieto announced plans Tuesday to build a new airport in Mexico City that can handle four times the traffic of the existing one, the second busiest in Latin America.

The new airport will have six runways and is projected to cost $9.1 billion.

Pena Nieto said the airport “will be the biggest infrastructure project in our country in many years and even one of the biggest in the world.”

It will be built on vacant federal land to the east of Benito Juarez International Airport, which handled about 31.5 million passengers last year.

Pena Nieto, in a 90-minute annual address to the nation, said Mexico couldn’t keep “postponing a solution” to the overcrowding at the capital airport, which regularly exceeds its operating capacity.

The bottlenecks at the airport “restrict movement around the country, limit Mexico’s ties to the world, put a brake on trade and investment, and create delays for users,” Pena Nieto said.

When engineers finished work on the existing airport in 1952, the capital had only 3 million residents. Since then, the metropolis has swollen to more than 20 million inhabitants, partially engulfing the airport, which occupies a dry lake bed.

Once built out to a capacity of 120 million passengers a year, the new airport could be one of the largest in the world, depending on the pace of growth at busy airports in places such as Chicago, Dubai, Beijing and Atlanta. Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the world’s busiest, handled 94.4 million passengers last year.