The Felipe Ángeles International Airport, better known as AIFA, has come a long way since it opened north of Mexico City in March 2022 with just seven destinations on the board. At President Claudia Sheinbaum's 500th morning press conference this week, airport director Isidoro Pastor Román confirmed the facility now serves 47 routes — 40 domestic and seven international, including Havana, Caracas, Bogotá and Santo Domingo. Seven passenger airlines operate there, up from four at the start, and more than 22 million travellers have passed through since opening day.

For years AIFA was criticised as a white-elephant project built by the military and far from anywhere useful. The numbers suggest it's gradually winning people over. Last year it handled 7.1 million passengers — still only around 16% of what the older Mexico City International Airport (AICM) processed in 2025, but steady growth. The game-changer for travellers came in April, when a rail link connected AIFA directly to central Mexico City, cutting what used to be a long, traffic-dependent drive into a straightforward train ride.

There are two other headline stats worth knowing. First, AIFA has quietly become Mexico's busiest cargo airport, with 53 cargo airlines using the facility — up from just two when it opened. Second, the airport says it turned financially profitable in the first quarter of 2024 and has generated 18,000 direct jobs plus an estimated 150,000 indirect ones. For travellers, that combination of growth and infrastructure usually means more competition on routes, more airlines to choose from and often better fares out of the capital.

Practically speaking, AIFA is now a genuine option for domestic trips across Mexico plus flights to the Caribbean and northern South America. If your hotel or plans put you in the northern part of Mexico City, it may even be more convenient than AICM. The mañanera also covered political drama unrelated to flights — a federal–state dispute over a US-backed police training academy in Querétaro — but that has no bearing on air travel.

If you're flying into Mexico City in the next year or two, it's worth checking which airport your route uses. AIFA's expansion is reshaping how visitors arrive in the capital, and with the train now running, the old complaints about its distance matter far less than they did in 2022.