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| Caribbean-Latin America |
| Mexico: Two airlines plan to take off by March 2006 |
| 2005-08-20 |
| Mexico will have two new airlines operating by March, helping drive down airfare costs and diversifying flights away from Mexico City's airport, the transportation secretary said. InterjetABC is scheduled to begin flights in December and Vuela Compania de Aviacion, owned by Carlos Slim's financial company and broadcaster Grupo Televisa SA, is expected to start operations by March, said Pedro Cerisola, Mexico's transportation minister in an interview yesterday. "We've got appetite from investors in this area that we haven't seen in many years," Cerisola said. Mexico's airline industry is entering a period of unprecedented competition, Cerisola said, with as many as five new airlines seeking to begin operations and the government's plan to sell by November its controlling stake in Aeromexico and Mexicana the country's two biggest airlines. The new airlines will operate out of regional airports in the cities of Toluca, Puebla and Cuernavaca to lower costs and help ease congestion at the Mexico City airport, which now handles 20 percent of air traffic, Cerisola said. The government in 2002 scrapped plans to build a US3 billion mega-airport to serve the Mexico City area, after machetewielding A US300 million project to add a second terminal to the Mexico City airport is likely to be the airport's last expansion, Cerisola said. Construction of the terminal, which will serve Aeromexico and its SkyTeam Air Alliance partners, will begin at the end of August, he said. Mexico will soon have to build a new airport near Cuernavaca, which is about 50 miles south of Mexico City, because of capacity constraint at the current airport, he said. Mexico City as arguably the largest city in the world has a tremendous amount of air traffic. Funneling all that traffic into the single airport has been possible only because of the almost ideal weather conditions there. |
| Posted by:Gleretch Unans6034 |