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MEXICO CITY — Magnicharters, a commercial airline — an industry defined entirely by the coordinated movement of people and aircraft between predetermined locations at agreed-upon times — announced late Saturday afternoon that it would be suspending all flights for two weeks due to what it described as “logistical issues,” a phrase chosen, analysts noted, for its remarkable ability to explain nothing while technically saying something.
The company, which exists solely to perform logistics, did not elaborate. This is consistent with its general reputation for customer service.
Magnicharters, for the uninitiated, occupies a specific and humbling tier of Mexican aviation: the kind of airline where the seat pocket contains one laminated card and the lamination is coming off. The kind where the fare is so low that passengers board with the quiet, private understanding that they have made a financial decision rather than a travel one. The kind of airline where “on time” is treated as a secondary consideration to “now arriving at your destination.”
Passengers, in other words, knew what they were getting into. They just assumed they’d be getting into a plane.
The announcement, posted to social media at approximately six minutes past six on a Saturday evening — a time selected possibly because it is the least convenient possible moment to receive information — immediately left thousands of passengers stranded at airports including Cancún, Mérida, and Huatulco, in what the company’s CEO Gabriel Bojórquez called “an inconvenience” and what stranded tourists in beachside resort towns called several other things.
Bojórquez stopped short of acknowledging that an airline failing to operate flights is, in the most literal possible sense, an airline failing to do the one thing it does.
The Mexican government coordinated emergency rebooking options through Aeroméxico, Viva Aerobús, and Volaris, each of which, notably, managed to continue performing logistics throughout the crisis.
As of press time, Magnicharters had promised updates in the coming days. The coming days have begun.
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