General Felipe Ángeles International Airport

Felipe Ángeles International Airport is one of three airports serving the Mexico City metropolitan area — the others being Mexico City International (MEX) and Toluca (TLC) — and is one of the newest large airports in the world, inaugurated in March 2022 on the grounds of Santa Lucía military air base 28 mi (45 km) north of central Mexico City. NLU handles 125 routes to 72 destinations operated by 31 airlines. The airport was commissioned to relieve the severe capacity constraints at the legacy MEX, which had operated at sustained overcapacity for more than a decade, after the cancellation of the partly built Texcoco mega-airport project. NLU's designation as General Felipe Ángeles International honors the Mexican Revolution general executed in 1919. The airport is operated under civil-military joint management by the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA), an unusual governance structure among major international airports. Volaris, Viva (formerly Viva Aerobus), Aeroméxico, and AeroUS Mexican operators have progressively migrated routes to NLU, with government pressure and regulatory incentives accelerating the shift. Other carriers include Copa Airlines, American, Delta, United, Arajet, Aerolíneas Argentinas, Conviasa, and a rotation of specialist cargo operators — NLU has been designated the preferred Mexico City-area cargo airport and handles a growing share of belly-hold and dedicated-freighter traffic. The route map concentrates on Mexican domestic destinations (Cancún, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Tijuana, Mérida, Puerto Vallarta, Oaxaca, Villahermosa), US Sunbelt markets (Houston, Dallas, Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas), and a growing contingent of Central and South American secondary cities. The airfield sits at an exceptionally high 7,369 ft (2,246 m) elevation — comparable to the legacy MEX — with three parallel runways: two at 14,764 ft (4,500 m) paved with polymer-modified asphalt (designations 04C/22C and 04L/22R) and a third at 11,483 ft (3,500 m) concrete (04R/22L). The two principal 4,500 m runways are among the longest in Latin America, sized to compensate for the thin high-altitude air. The single vast terminal complex features distinctive Mexican-modern architecture by Fernando Romero Enterprise with a monumental central hall. NLU is also connected to a purpose-built military aviation museum and airpark on the same site.