Mexicana Airlines ceased all operations after spending a few weeks trying to restructure and begin to figure a way out of bankruptcy.  It doesn’t really come as a giant surprise that one of the world’s oldest airlines stopped operating.  Unexplicably, Mexicana had stopped selling seats on their flights but kept operating them which left quite a few of us baffled.

Mexicana’s management blames high oil prices, labor and the swine flu outbreak and certainly all three contributed to the problems the airline had.  However, oil isn’t so high and swine flu really stopped being an issue on most people’s minds by late last year.  Labor is the real problem.

I often wonder why it is so hard for labor unions, particularly the kind that Mexicana has had to endure, really don’t seem to be able to grasp that even though an airline made your paycheck for several years, labor costs like that are unsustainable by anyone at the end.  Airlines can often wheeze through such things for years but there is always a reckoning and it always seems to shock unions when it results in a shutdown.  In fact, they always appear to refuse to believe it in some respects.

The maneuverings we saw around Mexicana for the last few weeks were somewhat pathetic to me.  New investors thought they saw an opportunity and moved in but, like many who do so, I think they suddenly learned just how cash intensive an airline is and wisely decided to put a stop to the burn quickly.

Will we see this airline rise again?  I sincerely doubt that Mexicana or its subsidiary companies will raise their wings again in their current form.  It’s possible someone will buy the brand and start an airline under the Mexicana name but it won’t be the Mexicana that just crashed and burned. 

It won’t be a foreign carrier coming to save them.  Mexico’s ownership laws forbid foreign ownership of their carriers above 25% and I think that’s a shame.  Someone like LAN or Avianca-TACA might have been willing to come in and invest, restructure and operate a viable entity.  Sadly, Mexico is more archaic than many Latin American countries these days when it comes to aviation and I sincerely doubt that Mexico’s government is going to move quickly to liberalize their ownership laws.

So, I think this is goodbye to Mexicana.  At least to this Mexicana.  To me, it’s a shame.  I’ve always liked their image and aircraft and kind of thought of them as the Braniff of Mexico.  Their colorful 727’s of the 70’s and 80’s were second only to Braniff’s and I simply also feel fond towards an airline that has a history dating back to the 1920’s and which was once connected to Juan Trippe and Pan Am.

Adios Mexicana.

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