It will be AM38, it will fly six times a week, it will last 12 and a half hours and will directly connect El Prat airports in Barcelona and Benito Juárez in Mexico City. It will start on March 29, 2026 and will mark Aeroméxico's return to Catalonia after a six-year pause initially marked by the pandemic, the presence of another operator in its natural market and an attempt announced at Fitur 2024 that finally did not materialize.
The return of the Mexican company coincides with a period of expansion of El Prat airport in international and intercontinental routes, although in this case the service to Mexico is not strictly new, since the company already operated it previously. What will be new after several seasons is the possibility of choosing an airline again to travel directly between both cities, since the route is also covered by Dubai's Emirates, which makes an intermediate stop here on a long flight that connects Dubai and Mexico on the same plane.
As it is not a company from either the country of origin or destination, the Spanish and Mexican governments granted the United Arab Emirates operator what in aeronautical law is called fifth freedom, a specific permit for companies from a third State to commercialize flights between two airports; as happened in its day with Singapore Airlines, which came to fly between Barcelona and São Paulo as a continuation of its connections between Singapore and Catalonia. The Mexican company will operate by its own right, as it already did competing for a few weeks in 2019 and 2020.
A strong competitor
Upon its return, Aeroméxico will find an already mature operator on the line. Emirates launched Barcelona-Mexico in December 2019 with the bad luck that the pandemic was about to close borders. The company resumed passenger flights in the summer of 2021, although it maintained some cargo operations between both cities using the available space in holds and even, sometimes, the passenger cabin to transport goods such as medicines or textiles.
Since the recovery of frequencies that post-COVID summer, Emirates has consolidated the direct flight and passengers who previously crossed the Atlantic with Aeroméxico could also do so, although the Mexican company offered connections via Madrid, Paris or Amsterdam, changing planes there. From next spring, passing through Barajas, Charles de Gaulle or Schiphol will be optional, since it will fly with its own planes between both points.
Lately, and for intercontinental flights, the airline uses the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, much more modern aircraft than the Boeing 767s it used to employ in its previous stages at El Prat, except for the last weeks of 2019 and first weeks of 2020.
Aeronaves de México
The company returning next year, originally Aeronaves de México, S.A., was founded 91 years ago, in September 1934, by businessman Antonio Díaz Lombardo. As with most airlines created in Latin America, the United States was behind it due to geopolitical interests.
In this case, the technical support and 49% of the original capital belonged to the legendary Pan American World Airways. During its first quarter-century, it operated unofficially as "the Mexican Pan Am" and flew with the typical aircraft of its era: Douglas DC-3, DC-4, and even operated the British Comet 4, always with Pan Am as the majority shareholder and industrial partner until in 1959 it officially adopted the commercial name Aeroméxico, with which it arrived in Europe in the 1960s.
The new name, which is still maintained today, coincided with the nationalization of 1959. It was privatized in 1988, heavily restructured that same year, had an intense dance of public and private shareholders in the following decades, and currently is experiencing a period of geographical expansion into Asian and European markets, with the American Delta Air Lines as a reference shareholder (20%).
The company is integrated into the SkyTeam airline alliance, a group of 18 international airlines that operates nearly 15,000 daily flights to 1,036 destinations worldwide. In the case of El Prat, half of the companies in this association fly to Barcelona, and some—like Air Europa, China Airlines, or Saudia—will be able to feed passengers for flights to Mexico City.
Aeroméxico or Emirates: Catalunya-Mexico competition is back on.