Mexican military aviation was born at Balbuena, on the plains east of the old city, where the first powered flight over Mexican soil was made in 1910 and where a military airfield with five runways opened in 1915. By the end of the Second World War the field was too small for the aircraft the air force was getting: Spanish Wikipedia records that Escuadrón 201, back from the Philippines in November 1945, had to settle at Las Bajadas in Veracruz because Balbuena’s runway was not big enough for its P-47 Thunderbolts.

The answer was a new base on open ground in the State of Mexico. Santa Lucía was established in 1952 to relocate Balbuena and formally inaugurated on 24 November 1952, under President Miguel Alemán. The move was slow: Wikipedia says aircraft went on transferring from Balbuena until 1959. The new runway was enormous by the standards of the day, 3,780 metres long and 75 wide, and it was later named after General Alfredo Lezama Álvarez, who commanded the base from 1961 to 1964.

For most of its history the Mexican Air Force has fought rebels and drug crops, not other air forces, and its jet inventory stayed small. The one modern fighter purchase came in 1982, when Mexico ordered twelve Northrop F-5E/F Tiger IIs. Infodefensa records that the first two reached Base Aérea Militar No. 1 on 10 August 1982. They formed Escuadrón Aéreo 401, the first and only supersonic unit in Mexican service.

Forty-three years later the same aircraft were still the whole of Mexico’s interceptor force. In August 2025 the air force commander, General Román Carmona Landa, told the press that nine F-5s remained, three of them operational, and that the air force was in the process of upgrading them; a replacement has been discussed but not funded. English Wikipedia’s base table places Escuadrón 401 at Ixtepec; the Infodefensa reporting used here places the F-5s at BAM 1, and the squadron’s current home has not been confirmed on an official page.

In March 2018 the presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador proposed either privatising the half-built airport at Texcoco or enlarging the Santa Lucía air base into an international airport. A consultation in October 2018 settled it: Spanish Wikipedia counts about 747,000 votes (69 per cent) for Santa Lucía against 310,463 (29 per cent) for Texcoco. The project was given to the army engineers, and construction began on 17 October 2019.

Felipe Ángeles International Airport opened on 21 March 2022, after an outlay that Spanish Wikipedia puts at 115,981 million pesos by that date. Existing military installations, including the runway and the aviation apron, were relocated and resized. The airport is owned by the government and operated by SEDENA; the Wikipedia articles differ on whether the air force kept one runway (04R/22L, 3,500 m, visual rules only, in the Spanish article) or two (adding a 3,000 m runway 04/22 to the west, in the English one).

The airport has been slow to fill: it handled 7,079,040 passengers in 2025, seventh among Mexican airports, according to English Wikipedia. Digging also produced the remains of at least 200 mammoths, now shown in the Santa Lucía Quinametzin Paleontological Museum, alongside the Military Aviation Museum with its 50 aircraft.

Behind the airport the base is still the heart of the air force. On 4 January 2025 General de Ala José Antonio Sierra Amador took command of BAM 1 and General de Ala Cuauhtémoc Delgado Monteagudo of the 1st Air Wing, both at Santa Lucía, according to Infodefensa. The transport squadrons work hard from here: on 11 January 2025 an L-100-30 Hercules, serial 3611, and a C-27J of Escuadrón Aéreo 302 left at about 08:00 with 74 firefighters and officials for the Los Angeles fires.

Ageing aircraft show. On 9 September 2025 C295M 3201, the first C295 Mexico received in 2010, came back from a training circuit and landed on its belly; no one was hurt, and Infodefensa called it the first such incident in fifteen years of the type in Mexican service. With all the C-130s expected to be gone by 2029, two C-130J-30 Super Hercules are on order, the first due in November 2028.