Flight to Puerto Escondido 2009

Our Piper Arrow

Background

My first flight into Mexico was in February 2008. We flew the Piper Arrow to Huatulco. See Flight to Huatulco. This will be my second flight and I am looking forward to it.

The first flight involved some stress in researching and complying with all the requirements for foreign flight. Nevertheless, that flight was quite enjoyable and now having been through all that, these next trip promises to be even more enjoyable. Even though I took hundreds of photos last time, I came to the realization that I didn't take enough pictures. See Photographing the Playas from the Huatulco trip. This time there will be more. See Photographing the Playas from this trip. There has been a request to photograph the progress on the new highway from Puerto Escondido to Oaxaca. I'll see what I can do.

On the last trip, I did not have the instrument approach plates to enable IFR flight. Fortunately the weather cooperated and I didn't need to fly IFR. However, I did cross some overcast area in the Gulf coastal plains, and I was just lucky that it did not include Tampico. On the first trip, I used Matamoros as the airport of entry. That did not work out so well because the airport was not expecting any more commercial flights that day so the immigration people had left and we had to wait for them to make a special trip back to the airport to issue our visas. Plus, some of the officials were located outside the airport in the airport tower area, while the immigration was located within the airport. We had to be escorted back and forth several times to complete the paperwork. Tampico has all the offices inside the airport so we will use Tampico as the airport of entry this time. On the last trip we returned to the U.S. through Brownsville and will do that again on this trip.

Flying a small airplane is generally not the cheapest way to get around but on our last trip with 3 people sharing expenses it was actually a little cheaper than flying commercial. Another attractive feature was the fact that we didn't have to go through the security checks. We even got to take bottled water on the plane. In Mexico there was almost no other general aviation traffic on our route. I wonder why more people don't fly small airplanes.

Sectional Charts

Sectional charts are used for VFR (visual flight rules) navigation. They show landmarks that can be recognized from the air. These sectional charts are very old, but at least the mountains haven't changed much. One thing they don't show is restricted areas. You need the enroute low altitude charts for that, even if you don't intend to fly IFR. The MXLEN waypoint that I have added on the .pdf map collection is for threading between two rather closely spaced restricted areas, and a third small circular restricted area, MM(R)-1.

Tampico North

Tampico South

Orizaba

Tehuacan

Oaxaca

.pdf file with southern half of route (5 maps), includes user waypoints

Enroute Low Altitude Charts

Enroute Low Altitude charts are used for IFR (instrument flight rules) navigation. They show radio landmarks that can be used for navigation when the ground is not visible. This time I purchased the Mexico travel kit from Jeppesen which includes all of the approach plates and enroute low altitude charts for Mexico at a cost of about US$100. The charts displayed below I won't be keeping up to date so they are not for your navigation.

Brownsville to Tampico

Tampico to Veracruz

Veracruz to Puerto Escondido

Approach Plates

An approach plate is an IFR landing procedure that guides an airplane to landing when the runway is obscured by clouds or other conditions. I threw in a couple of departure procedures as well. Again, I am not keeping these up to date; they are just for whoever might be curious about such things, not for navigation.

Tampico ILS 13

Puerto Escondido VOR DME 27

Veracruz VOR/DME2 Rwy 18

Tampico Departure 18

Tampico Departure 36

Flight Plan

We plan to stop in Corpus Christi for fuel and then fly on an IFR flight plan to Tampico, which will be the airport of entry. After staying overnight in Tampico, we will fly the remainder of the way to Puerto Escondido in the morning. The IFR altitude requirements are too high for the Tampico to Puerto Escondido leg, so that part of the flight will have to be VFR.

Now on to Corpus Christi.

eAPIS, the New Customs Requirement

The US Department of Homeland Security requires that pilots of private aircraft transmit notices of arrival and/or departure and traveler manifest information to Customs and Border Protection electronically a minimum of 60 minutes prior to departure. Beginning May 18, 2009, this must be done using eAPIS, the Electronic Advance Passenger Information System, or another CBP-approved electronic data interchange system. The eAPIS web site is at https://eapis.cbp.dhs.gov/. To use this system, you need to plan ahead because it takes a week to get registered to use the eAPIS. But after waiting 2 weeks to receive my authentication by email (it never arrived), I enrolled a second time--still waiting. Third time is the charm. It seems my spam filter has been taking the authentication emails. Now I can be legal for the next trip.

This new requirement is not going to be convenient. I know of no plans for Mexican airports to provide internet access for departing pilots. I expect I will just have to file my return manifest before I enter Mexico and hope to still be on schedule when I return a week later.