Henry Romero/REUTERS
Thousands of people’s travel plans were upended after flooding shut down Mexico City’s main airport on Sunday evening.
Data from Flightradar24 showed that more than 70 flights were forced to land at other airports, and roughly another 90 were canceled.
In a statement shared on X, Benito Juárez International Airport said the aviation authority shut down operations for three hours due to heavy rainfall and low visibility.
It’s among the busiest airports in Latin America, serving over 45 million passengers last year.
Flight-tracking data showed that the first planes started diverting around 6 p.m. local time. No flights landed for around another six hours, and some disruption continued Monday morning.
The majority of Sunday’s diverted flights landed at other Mexican airports, but some never got that far.
Air Canada Flight 993 left Toronto around 9 p.m. ET and flew for three hours before making a U-turn just south of Houston, flight-tracking data showed.
Passengers touched down back in Toronto at 1:28 a.m., 5½ hours after leaving there, in a so-called flight to nowhere.
Similarly, American Airlines Flight 2417, from Dallas-Fort Worth, had barely crossed the Mexican border before returning two hours later.
Another American Airlines flight, from New York City, changed course over Alabama before circling over Texas five times and landing at Dallas-Fort Worth.
As the airport is American’s main hub, the airline can reroute passengers from there more easily.
After three hours in the sky, a United Airlines flight from Washington, DC, U-turned over the Gulf of Mexico. It landed about two hours later in Houston, one of the airline’s main hubs.
Even for those flights that reached Mexico, some passengers were likely to wake up in a different city than expected.
After 10 hours crossing the Atlantic Ocean, an Aeromexico flight from Paris circled a couple of times before diverting to Guadalajara, about 280 miles away from Mexico City.
An Iberia flight from Madrid changed course over the Gulf of Mexico to land in Cancún, some 800 miles away from the capital and a 10-hour journey.
The Associated Foreign Press reported that the capital’s government activated a purple alert, the highest level, due to Sunday’s heavy rain.
It added that there was up to 19 inches of flood water in some areas of the city, which has a population of over 9 million.
The airlines did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent by Business Insider outside local working hours.
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