MEXICO CITY — Mexico launched its military-run airline Tuesday, when the primary Mexicana airways flight took off from Mexico City certain for the Caribbean resort of Tulum.
It was one other signal of the outsized position that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has given to Mexico’s armed forces. The airline’s military-run holding firm now additionally operates a couple of dozen airports, inns, trains, the nation’s customs service and vacationer parks.
Gen. Luís Cresencio Sandoval, Mexico’s protection secretary, mentioned that having all these numerous companies run by the navy was “common in developed countries.”
In reality, just a few nations like Cuba, Sri Lanka, Argentina and Colombia have military-run airways. They are principally small carriers with a handful of prop planes that function totally on under-served or distant home routes.
But the Mexicana airline plans to hold vacationers from Mexican cities to resorts like Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, Los Cabos, Zihuatanejo, Acapulco and Mazatlan. Flights look like scheduled each three or 4 days, largely on weekends.
The provider hopes to compete primarily on worth: the primary 425 tickets bought provided costs of about $92 for the flight from Mexico City to Tulum, which the federal government claimed was about one-third cheaper than business airways.
Mexicana additionally hopes to fly to 16 small regional airports that at present don’t have any flights or only a few. For these fearful about being informed to “Fasten your seatbelt, and that’s an order,” the cabin crew on the Mexicana flight seemed to be civilians. In Mexico, the air drive is a wing of the military.
Sandoval mentioned the airline started operations with three Boeing jets and two smaller leased Embraer planes, and hopes to lease or purchase 5 extra jets in early 2024.
López Obrador known as the takeoff of the primary Boeing 737-800 jet “a historic event” and a “new stage,” marking the return of the previously government-run airline Mexicana, which had been privatized, then went bankrupt and at last closed in 2010.
The airline combines Lopez Obrador’s reliance on the navy – which he claims is essentially the most incorruptible and patriotic arm of the federal government – and his nostalgia for the state-run firms that dominated Mexico‘s economy until widespread privatizations were carried out in the 1980s.
López Obrador recalled fondly the days when government-run firms operated everything from oil, gas, electricity and mining, to airlines and telephone service. He bashed the privatizations, which were carried out because Mexico‘s indebted government could no longer afford to operate the inefficient, state-owned companies.
“They carried out a big fraud,” the president said at his daily morning news briefing. “They deceived a lot of people, saying these state-run companies didn’t work.”
In reality, the state-run firms in Mexico collected a well-deserved repute for inefficiency, poor service, corruption and political management. For instance, Mexico‘s state-run paper distribution company often refused to sell newsprint to opposition newspapers.
When the national telephone company was owned by the government, customers routinely had to wait years to get a phone line installed, and were required to buy shares in the company in order to eventually get service, problems that rapidly disappeared after it was privatized in 1990.
While unable to restore the government-run companies to their former glory, the administration depicts its efforts to recreate them on a smaller scale as part of a historic battle to return Mexico‘s economy to a more collectivist past.
“This will be the great legacy of your administration, and will echo throughout eternity,” the air traffic controller at Mexico City‘s Felipe Angeles airport intoned as the first Mexicana flight took off.
López Obrador has also put the military in charge of many of the country’s infrastructure constructing initiatives, and given it the lead position in home legislation enforcement.
For instance, the military constructed each the Felipe Angeles airport and the one in Tulum.
Apart from boosting visitors on the underused Felipe Angeles airport, the military-run Mexicana apparently will present flights to feed passengers into the president’s Maya Train tourism undertaking. The military can be constructing that prepare line, which can join seashore resorts and archaeological websites on the Yucatan Peninsula.
The military, which has no expertise operating business flights, has created a subsidiary to be in control of Mexicana.
