I love to fly. More than that, I love nearly everything that’s associated directly to flying. More specifically, I love airports.
When I travel I sometimes try to get a stop (if stops there must be) either at airports I like or at airports I’ve never been to before. Since I don’t travel very often, that usually doesn’t happen. But recently I had a chance to use the airport at Toluca, an industrial town close to Mexico City.
The airport there is quite old, but until recently it was used almost exclusively by small, private planes and some courier and cargo firms (FedEx and UPS have a long association with it). From time to time the two national airlines (which were for a time the only airlines), Mexicana and Aeromexico, tried to use it as an alternate to the City’s airport, but they always failed.
Starting in 2005, though, two low cost airlines, Volaris and Interjet, set up shop there. Their reasons were twofold: 1) to aviod the congestion at Mexico City’s airport, and 2) to cut costs, since Toluca has lower operational fees. Two other airlines, also low cost, ahve tried using it. One, Click Mexicana (a subsidiary of Mexicana de Aviacion), decided it didn’t work and moved back to the City. The other, Avolar, still runs flights from there, but it is struggling and has greatly reduced its schedules in that part of the country. Continental Airlines offers a daily trip to Houston from Toluca operated by its subsidiary Express Jet, which of course makes Toluca an international airport.
The airport has worked very well. Last year it passed the 2 million passenger mark. It draws mostly business fliers, which reflects the low costs sound business plan, but also a fair share of the tourist trade. However, it can be expensive to get there from some parts of Mexico City. Interjet offers a shuttle service for about $20 round trip, but all its pickup locations are in the Western and North parts fo town. Volaris offers complimentary bus service round trip, but only to one destination in the Western part of the City.
What’s hard to believe is that such a little airport handles so many people. It is much like most airports in layout. You go into a lobby with a few shops and see the airline counters right in front of you right away. That’s a raher large area, well kept and it feels brand new. You then move to the security checkpoint, which is like any other in the world. Then you get to the terminal. That one looks more like a bus depot than an airport. It’s a large room with chairs in rows in the middle, shops and restaurants on three sides, and five glass doors in the other side. Next to each door there’s a small counter with a led sign that announces airline and flight info.
That’s it.
You wait till one counter has your flight on it, then wait till the ground crew announces the flight. More often than not you’ll see the flight crew gather at a door, board a small van and be whisked to the plane. Passengers board a bus which takes them to their ariplane. Once there you go up a portable staircase like they did in the 50s. The planes are parked on a concrete mat, about six of them at a time. from there they roll to the one taxiway and onto the one runway and take off.
It hardly seems possible such a tiny facility can do so much. But there it is.
I flew Interjet to Monterrey (that’s a town about 500 miles from Mexico City in Nuevo Leon state, it’s mostly an industrial and business center, also capital of its state). Interjet flies only an A-320 variant in all its routes. It was very comfortable, though the air conditioning was rather weak. The seats are leather, have lots of leg room and recline well enough for a nap. This airline also does something I very much enjoyed: it shows flight info on the onboard screens from around 20 minutes after takeoff to 10 minutes before landing. They show the plane’s position on a map in three different scales, then show a screen with ground speed, altitude, outside air temperature, local time and time remaining before landing. It all cycles in about a minute and a half. I loved it.
One bad thing about Toluca is that it tends to get foggy when its cold, and it does get cold in winter (around 5 to minus 4 Celsius as low day temp). And since it’s even higher from sea level than Mexico City, low cloud ceilings are common. On the return flight we hit one such low ceiling. We must have spent about 5 minutes enshrouded in cloud, everything white as far as the eye can see, which means we were blind to the outside. This was ll close to landing, too. I half-expected we’d emerge from the cloud right on top of the runway, which is about the most dangerous thing to do when landing.
It wasn’t that bad. We came out about ten miles from the runway at a guess. I dind’t spot the airport, but I spotted the intersection leading from the highway to the airport. It’s easy to spot because a large mall sits there. By then you’re low enough to read the names on the big stores, too. That’s quite an experience.
I’m very favorably impressed with Interjet, less so with Toluca airport. But I do see bigger things in its future. It doesn’t quite have room to expand, but it sits near a rural area rather than an urban area as Mexico’s airport does. So perhaps land can be acquired to expand it. There are industrial areas nearby, too, which may preclude urbanization about the airport. The terminal building can be made bigger, jetwats can be added. If that’s done, and if cheap transportation can be arranged (and it might be), then Toluca’s airport could grow, on its own, to be either an alternate or complementary airport to mexico City’s congested one. The fog and low ceilings, though, will remain a problem.
My round trip ticket came to about $160 US. It made me think about day trips for pleasure to other places. Imagine a day trip, or a short weekend trip, to the beach, to a large shopping center, to a city rife with museums, to Vegas, to a border town, etc. Then my imagination ran further:
Imagine supersonic flights. Now imagine them relatively cheap, say $300 round trip NYC to London or Paris. Now imagine hypersonic flights (3 to 5 times the speed of sound), Los angeles to Tokyo in less then 4 hours.Weekend trips to Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, even perhaps Australia.
It gets even better: sub-orbital flights on parabolic arches spanning Sydney on one end and New York on the other, taking perhaps 90 minutes, most of the travel done above the atmosphere in weightlessness. Nowhere in the world any farhter from anywhere else more than a couple of hours.
Imagine the possibilities for really exotic vacations. Imagine hypersonic and sub-orbtal travel so commonplace as to make business apointments in another continent, or even dinner apointments, as common as cross-town ones.
Of course there’s the matter of how to do it. More on that later.
Ok, Toluca is around 2,650 meters above sea level and tends to ahve a colder weather than other cities in the region, such as Mexico City (alt 2,250 meters). So yes, what would be low clouds in Mexico become fog in Toluca, and the ceiling is lower as well.