“It has been several hard months for aviation in Latin America, but we are targeting a niche that is not even Aeromar covered. We go to destinations that Aeromar served, but with routes that no airline has today,” Herrera García told Expansion.
Aerus is an airline that will start operations on April 27. herrera group –which also does business primarily in the automotive industry as distributorand in the financial and real estate fields– has a history in Rafilher Air Transportan air taxi service that has been operating since 1990, and which became the company name of the airline in the concession granted by the Ministry of Infrastructure, Communications and Transport (SICT) on May 16, 2022.
The airline has a regional vocation that will be based at the General Mariano Escobedo International Airport in Monterrey, Nuevo León, from where it will operate routes to Victoria City, Matamoros, Piedras Negras and Tampicoas well as a route between Tampico and Matamoros.
The company will start with three aircraft -owned by the company-, and has an agreement with Eviation for up to 14 aircraft that it plans to operate by the first half of 2025. Of these, seven aircraft are equipment Cessna Grand Caravan EX (with a capacity of nine passengers) and seven Cessna Sky Courierwhich can serve up to 19 people.
The manager assures that the market that his initial routes will cover had almost 700,000 passengers annually when it was served by other regional companies, at the end of the 90s. “They were widely used routes, with a very good load factor; The road and transport infrastructure has not changed. It is there where we see the niche of being able to increase air connectivity in Mexico”.
In the medium term, Aerus plans to open routes to the region of the Gulf of Mexico and the southeast of the countryin states such as Veracruz, Tabasco, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, as well as northern Central America.
In addition, he hopes that the recovery of the Category 1 of air safety allows the opening of flights to the center and south of Texas for the fall, if the Mexican authorities comply with the requirements of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). However, the expansion plan does not include Mexico City.
“Aerolittoral It came to have 80 planes, and they had bases in Monterrey, Veracruz, Hermosillo, Tijuana. The regional market is very large, and we are focused on the niche of what it was before”, concludes Herrera García.