December 2012
Mexico, Presidential TFRs and Personal Limits
Last month my wife and I made our last trip to Mexico for the year. The trip down was long but routine. The trip back was something else…
Longtime readers of my column will recall that my wife Kate is a pediatrician with an interest in medical mission work. Before we were married, she spent over two years at a Catholic hospital in Papua New Guinea, and we’ve travelled together for shorter missions (from one week to one month at a time) in Ghana, Cameroon, Guatemala, Uganda and the Philippines.
For the past 15 years, Kate has also worked regularly at weekend clinics in San Blas, Sinaloa, Mexico—and that’s where her mission work connects with flying. The San Blas clinic is a half-hour drive from El Fuerte, which has a 4,300-foot asphalt runway.
From our home base in Modesto, Calif. (KMOD) to El Fuerte, Mexico (MM79) is about eight hours flying time provided headwinds aren’t too bad, but add in two stops—one each for fuel and customs—and you’re looking at a 10-hour day. On this trip it was made a bit longer by the fact that one of our passengers needed to be picked up in Oakland (KOAK).
That presented a problem: El Fuerte is not lighted, so it’s essential to get there before dusk. To save time, I arranged to pick the passenger up on Thursday night—she stayed in our guest bedroom, and that eliminated a stop on departure. A second passenger met us at Chino (KCNO), which I used as our fuel stop.
We flew to Ciudad Obregon (MMCN), where we passed customs with time to spare and finally arrived at El Fuerte almost an hour before dusk.
After a long day and a half at the clinic, Sunday morning arrived. The first two legs, from El Fuerte back to Ciudad Obregon and then on to Calexico (KCXL) where we passed U.S. customs, were routine. Then came the first big challenge: the president was visiting California, which put a big fat TFR in our way, extending 30 miles from LAX.
My route from Calexico to Chino stayed outside the TFR, but a direct route from Chino to Oakland—or for that matter, any of the usual routes assigned by ATC to exit the Los Angeles basin to the north—would go through it.
Just to make things even more interesting, the president was planning to visit Bakersfield and Tehachapi the next day; if for any reason we didn’t get out of the L.A. area on Sunday, we’d have a heck of a time figuring out a route to keep clear of those TFRs in the morning!
I was aware of all this ahead of time thanks to an alert flight service briefer who I talked to on Thursday night before the flight south, and had spent some of the time on the 3.5-hour leg from Ciudad Obregon to Calexico working out a route to keep us out of Sunday’s TFR and make ATC happy.
The route was: from Chino, direct to the Paradise VOR as usual—but then, instead of the usual airways to the northwest, V442 to APLES intersection (42 miles northeast), then V386 to Palmdale and from there the usual set of airways to Oakland. I’d called in an IFR flight plan along that route immediately after closing out my border-crossing flight plan, and when I called for the clearance at Chino, I heard the magic words “cleared as filed.”
We didn’t quite fly that route—once past the TFR, we were given several shortcuts which helped keep the time en route down, but fought headwinds at 10,000 MSL (required for part of the route) so the leg took a bit over three hours with pretty much clear conditions, barring a little haze.
I was told to expect the visual approach to Oakland, but preloaded the ILS 27R just in case. That turned out to be a good thing—the final controller abruptly cleared me direct GROVE (which is on the ILS), and also asked me to maintain maximum speed to a five-mile final. Inevitably I wound up high, but managed to bleed off the speed and make a pretty good landing. My passenger cheered and thanked us for the drop-off.
I had intended to buy at least 10 gallons of fuel from the nice folks at KaiserAir (Oakland’s FBO) in order to avoid paying a ramp fee, but they told me that wasn’t necessary—and their ramp was extremely busy. It was also getting late (around 9:00 p.m.). I got a weather briefing, and filed direct Modesto, figuring I’d accept whatever clearance I was given.
We went out to the airplane, and I was smart enough to find a line guy and ask advice on taxiing off the ramp. He was kind enough to wait until we started and give me hand signals. I stopped before the taxiway, called clearance, and got departure instructions that I was already familiar with from my passenger pick-up Friday night. So far, so good. I called ground and was told to taxi via Charlie to 28R.
Now comes the embarrassing bit… I’ve reviewed the notes I wrote the next morning several times, and I’m not going to inflict them on readers. Suffice it to say that with the lateness of the hour and confusing lights, I got lost trying to find the departure end of 28R.
A very patient ground controller eventually cleared me across 28R to 28L, and we departed from there. Although it was a clear night, I asked for and flew a complete ILS procedure to Modesto because I wasn’t about to take a chance on getting lost again. We arrived after 10:00 p.m.
What I take from this is that we had a combination of one leg too many and exceeding my limit on a duty day. We started from El Fuerte about 08:00 and tied down at Modesto after 22:00, 14 hours later. That’s clearly too much.
Flying into Modesto—a field I know like the back of my hand—after dark at the end of a long day is one thing. Flying into Oakland (or anyplace else) and then taxiing at an unfamiliar field after dark and executing a departure procedure is clearly more than I can handle. (Thinking this through afterward, I came to the reluctant conclusion that even landing at Modesto so late is taking a big risk—if anything unexpected came up, I might not be able to think my way out of it).
After this experience I am setting a new personal limit: no more than eight hours flying time, 10 hours total time, in any single day. If it’s not possible to get to my final destination in that time, I need to find a hotel room and finish in the morning!
A couple of things on the trip that worked well: I signed up for a one-month subscription to Flight Guide’s iEFB app for the iPad and used its WAC charts for navigation in Mexico. The app worked perfectly, with one annoyance: Flight Guide shows the chart, and appears to accurately map GPS position onto it, but it doesn’t have Mexican navaids and airports in its database, so you can’t enter a flight plan using normal identifiers.
I worked around that by zooming in on the airport/navaid in question, and tapping it with my finger. A pop-up lists the nearest locations in the database but also offers a “create point” option, and that was enough to put a line on the chart and get distance estimates. I also used Jeppesen Mobile FD for IFR charts, and between the two, that provided me with an effective electronic trip kit.
One of my partners had trouble during a flight to Oshkosh earlier this year when his iPad overheated on a long leg, and I’ve had an unexpected hiccup with mine during an instrument approach. Such things make me nervous flying without at least minimal paper backup.
In U.S. airspace, I work around that with Air Chart System’s atlases and Flight Guide’s printed edition, which gives localizer frequencies and headings. While not a full substitute for an instrument approach plate, it would be enough to get by in an emergency—but that wouldn’t work in Mexico, where the airports I fly don’t have localizers.
Before this trip, I thought up an alternative that worked perfectly: call up the Mexican plates on Jepp FD, and press the iPad’s two buttons at the same time to take a screen shot, then connect the iPad to my desktop PC, copy the screen shot over and print it. Printing in pairs (approach plate next to the airport diagram) as two 4 x 6 images on a single piece of 8.5 x 11-inch paper works particularly well—folded in half, they’re just about the same size as standard plates.
For these trips, I only needed them for a few Mexican airports. The same approach works with ForeFlight or other apps to produce U.S. charts, and carrying the most likely plate (ILS or equivalent) and airport diagram for primary and alternate airports would be a very good idea if IFR is expected. I plan to do that on my next trip. –JDR
John D. Ruley is an instrument-rated pilot, freelance writer, and holds a master’s degree from the University of North Dakota Space Studies program (space.edu). He is a volunteer pilot with ligainternational.org, which operates medical missions in northwest Mexico. He is also a member of the board of directors of Mission Doctors Association (missiondoctors.org). Send questions or comments to editor@www.piperflyer.com.
