MEXICO CITY (CN) — The head of Mexico’s air navigation service provider resigned Sunday after the publication of videos showing two planes almost colliding on the runway at the Mexico City International Airport Saturday night.
The videos show a plane given clearance to land pulling up at the last second after the pilot saw that another aircraft was already on the runway with clearance to take off. Mexican airline Volaris operates both planes.
Víctor Manuel Hernández Sandoval, director general of Mexico’s government-run air navigation service provider Seneam, resigned Sunday in the wake of the incident.
Saturday’s near-miss, however, was not the first such event over Mexico City. Pilots, air traffic controllers, specialists and residents have been calling on the government to take action on what they describe as a dangerously unorganized airspace over the capital since Seneam redesigned it in March 2021.
They have reported dozens of close calls — near-midair collisions and even cases of planes coming dangerously close to crashing into the ground — but say that those reports had gone unheeded by authorities until this weekend.
“The reports are there, the authorities know about them first-hand, but they just receive them and don’t pay attention to them,” Heriberto Salazar Eguiluz, president of Mexico’s Aviation Pilots Association, told Courthouse News on Saturday before the incident.
“We had warnings about this. Now they either have to do something to avoid an accident or wait until we see one. The problem is that the government is denying that there’s a problem, saying that they don’t have reports of these incidents, but they’re hiding the truth,” he said.
The warnings did not fall on deaf ears, however, at the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations (IFALPA), which issued a safety bulletin last week, citing insufficient training of air traffic controllers in Mexico City.
The result has been confusion, as crews have not been using the proper phraseology recommended by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The IFALPA bulletin also mentions the problem of planes arriving with low fuel levels due to unplanned holding over the city as they wait to land.
“An accident would be just the tip of the iceberg. All these incidents beforehand are what lie below the water,” said Salazar, who added he would not be surprised to see a disastrous accident under the current design of the airspace over Mexico City, which he described as "chaos."
Aviation accident investigator María Larriva Sahd, who became Mexico’s first female air traffic controller in 1977, shares his concern.
“I wouldn't be surprised to see an accident, because the arrival procedures were designed with the wrong parameters,” she said. "We have reports of design errors, lack of training and also a lack of situational awareness among both controllers and pilots.”
Passengers on flights in and out of Mexico City should be concerned, Larriva said. She also said that the current confusion is no accident.
“I believe that behind this there is the deliberate intention for passengers to be worried, to try and make them want to fly to Felipe Ángeles,” she said, referring to Mexico City’s new airport, which opened on the Santa Lucía military base north of the city in March.
“Those in charge are taking several measures to make people fed up with the Mexico City International Airport to make them want to go to Santa Lucía, but they aren’t going to go there,” she said, citing the low number of flights to the new airport and the lack of connectivity between the two.
Salazar agreed, saying: “They’re creating a crisis here in Mexico so that people will view the airport in Santa Lucía as the way to save us from it.”
The Felipe Ángeles International Airport currently operates six flights daily, most of them domestic. While it was denominated an international facility by the government, it has not been certified as meeting standards set by ICAO and the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
The only international flight it operates is a weekly service to and from Caracas, Venezuela, by the Venezuelan airline Conviasa. Venezuela does not adhere to ICAO and IATA standards.
“The Felipe Ángeles airport isn’t finished, it doesn’t have everything it needs to function properly, and that’s why airlines don’t want to fly there. No one wants to go lose money there,” said Larriva.
Seneam did not respond to a request for comment, but Saturday’s incident appears to have gotten the government’s attention.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador addressed the incident in his morning press conference Monday, saying that the secretariat of the interior would have a meeting to “straighten up” the airspace.
However, when asked about the problem with the redesign of the airspace, he said that “it doesn’t exist,” attributing the reports of issues to his political opponents.
“What we’re seeing is resistance spurred by conservatism,” said López Obrador. “They question everything, even when it’s ridiculous to do so. I don’t know what’s wrong with them. They should calm down.”
Salazar said the pilots association is not a political organization and that reports of incidents are based solely on concerns for the safety of passengers and flight crews.
Larriva, who retired from air traffic control in 2004 and has also worked with the pilots association, the Air Force and other air traffic entities likewise attributed her concern to safety and not political affiliation.
She said the solution lies in returning to the flight procedures from before the restructuring of the airspace, which handled more flights than the current workload.
“These problems can be quickly fixed, whenever those in charge make the decision to change the situation,” she said. “This shows the incompetence of the system, and that it must be changed.”
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