US Cargo Carriers Favor AIFA Over Mexico City's AICM, Sheinbaum Says

US cargo carriers are choosing Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA) over Mexico City's Benito Juárez International (AICM), President Claudia Sheinbaum said this week — a quiet but consequential shift in where Mexican air freight touches down.

The statement confirms what operators' route maps have hinted at for a while: AIFA, opened in March 2022 on the former Santa Lucía military airbase north of the capital, is winning the cargo business that AICM once took for granted. AICM remains slot-constrained and passenger-prioritized, which leaves freight carriers with a simple calculus.

Why are US carriers picking AIFA?

AIFA offers what AICM can't: room. Dedicated cargo infrastructure, available slots and highway access to the Bajío manufacturing belt make it the practical choice for freighter operators serving the US-Mexico corridor. Sheinbaum's framing wasn't speculative — she was describing a preference carriers had already shown.

For forwarders, that means the Mexico City airfreight entry point is effectively bifurcating. Urgent, integrator-driven e-commerce freight increasingly lands at AIFA; belly cargo on passenger flights still flows through AICM. Shippers booking consolidated air freight into the Valley of Mexico should confirm which airport their routings actually use — trucking times and handling costs differ.

What does this change for shippers and carriers?

What does this change in practice? Ground time, mainly. AIFA sits roughly 45 kilometers north of central Mexico City, so door deliveries shift accordingly. Carriers gain cheaper, less congested operations; forwarders gain capacity reliability; shippers gain a longer dray to the capital's industrial zones.

The commercial logic cuts both ways. US-Mexico air cargo demand has grown steadily as nearshoring pushes supply chains southward. Carriers that moved early to AIFA now hold the operational advantage, and Sheinbaum's public endorsement suggests the government intends to keep steering freight traffic there rather than relaxing AICM's constraints.

That's a policy signal, not just an observation. Successive administrations have treated AICM's saturation as a fact of life and AIFA as the relief valve. Nothing in the president's comments indicated that will change.

For now, the trend line is clear: cargo follows capacity, and in central Mexico the capacity lives at AIFA. Expect US freighter operators to keep consolidating their Mexico City-area operations at the northern airport while AICM settles into a passenger-and-belly-cargo role.