María Larriva Sahd

First air traffic controller in Mexico (1976); later a specialist in aircraft accident and incident investigation

María Larriva Sahd entered air traffic control in Mexico in 1976, becoming the country's first air traffic controller — some sources specify she was the first woman in the role, while others describe her simply as the first controller overall. She trained at the Centro Internacional de Adiestramiento de Aviación Civil (CIAAC), Mexico's civil aviation training institution, and went on to work at two of the country's busiest airports: Mexico City and Monterrey. Her career in active air traffic control lasted 27 years, an unusually long tenure directing real aircraft movement at major airports. She paired that with 35 years of work as an instructor and aviation advisor, training and mentoring the controllers who came after her. After stepping back from active control work, Larriva Sahd moved into a related but distinct specialty: aircraft accident and incident investigation, analyzing what actually went wrong when aviation safety fails rather than directing traffic to prevent it in the first place. She has remained a prominent, currently active voice in Mexican aviation safety, appearing regularly in Mexican media as a commentator — including public criticism of Mexico City's airspace redesign and the plan for simultaneous operations between the Felipe Ángeles International Airport (Santa Lucía) and Mexico City International Airport (AICM), raising real safety concerns about how that airspace reorganization was being handled.

As an air traffic controller, she directed the movement of aircraft at two of Mexico's busiest airports to keep them safely separated; as an accident investigator afterward, she analyzes wreckage, data, and procedure after something goes wrong to determine the real cause — two genuinely different technical specialties, both distinct from flying an aircraft.

Her public criticism of Mexico City's airspace redesign is a live, current example of exactly the kind of real-world airspace-safety analysis that airspace-classification lessons are meant to prepare students to eventually understand.

No official government biography or Wikipedia page exists for her; her exact birth date and birthplace were not found in the available Mexican news and interview sources this profile draws from.

A21 Aviación; López-Dóriga Digital; Mundo de Hoy — corroborated across multiple independent Mexican news/interview sources

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