It’s never nice to deliver bad news. On this occasion, and despite the fact that the announced end of the airline Aeromar has been a recurring theme without it coming to fruition, today it does seem to be a matter of days (perhaps 10, perhaps 20) for the once oldest airline in the Mexican market -since it accumulated more years without bankruptcies or strikes-, ceases to operate definitively.
Just yesterday, the umpteenth meeting was held at the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare to inform the workers that all the efforts they have made (including a business plan that could really help the airline to refloat) have not yielded the expected fruit. : the investors, real and illusory, who have advertised before various secretariats, including the Sedena, run away when they find out that to take ownership of the shares they have to invest some 600 million dollars (half to pay debts with the government and the rest to liquidate different creditors that the company has been accumulating over the years).
With that amount, it is obvious, any investor can start a great airline in any market in the world without being subject to the vagaries of politics. But the truth is that Aeromar is the victim of various factors, something like combining hunger with the desire to eat and the table set.
In other words, this airline, created in 1987 by Don Marcos Katz, a Polish immigrant who came to Mexico in the middle of World War II, a victim of anti-Semitic hatred, and soon became prominent in the community, came to To be a benchmark regional and innovative airline. Its aircraft, the Italian-French ATR, are the best for short routes where they use less fuel and have the perfect number of seats for this type of operation.
However, in this country where no authority distinguishes (neither today nor before) between regional and trunk, despite the fact that their difference is very clear in the Aviation Law, Aeromar never received the treatment that a company dedicated to the connectivity of small aerodromes that link regions and support the development of strategic businesses, such as the oil tanker (Salina Cruz) or the steel company (Lázaro Cárdenas).
Their business model was successful until about 15 years ago. Few passengers, captive customers on specific routes, high prices and low profile. A few years ago an effort was made to give it another vocation, but the proposal did not prosper because it was expected that the idea would make Germán Efromovich, an Avianca shareholder, fall in love with it, who wanted to buy it, but he ended up exiled and ostracized.
The rest has been rowing against the current, accumulating debts, stopping paying the government, the workers and getting by. Despite his efforts to defer payments and request extensions, seek investors and exonerate owner Zvi Katz, who is said to live in Israel, Aeromar director Danilo Correa has reached the limit of what is possible.
At this moment, say those in the know, only a miracle could save the regional airline that meant a lot in the life of the country’s air community. Another aerial failure in times of the 4T.
