Mexico's frugal president-elect stuck for hours on commercial flight

Mexico’s President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has vowed to sell the presidential jet and fly commercial after taking power, was stuck on the tarmac for several hours after bad weather closed the capital’s airport.

Bad weather in Mexico City, which is in its rainy season, temporarily closed the airport on Wednesday, creating chaos and delay for hundreds of passengers.

The president-elect, who won a landslide victory in July, has vowed to run an austere government. He has promised to turn the presidential palace into a cultural center, and sell the presidential plane.

“I’m not going to change my mind because of this, I won’t get on the presidential plane,” Lopez Obrador said while stuck on the commercial jet, videos on local media showed.

Local media reported that Lopez Obrador’s flight from the beach resort of Huatulco on the Pacific coast was delayed by around four hours, including three with the passengers already on board.

Construction of a new $13 billion airport for Mexico City to replace the current one, which is often crowded and has no room to expand, is underway. But Lopez Obrador has been skeptical of the project and his team have proposed an alternative plan to build two new runways at a military airbase near the capital and maintain the current airport.

There will be a public consultation in October on the project’s future.

Reporting by Veronica Gomez, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien