PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Plane of singer Jenni Rivera missing in Mexico
Old 14th Dec 2012, 14:30
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chuks
 
Join Date: Apr 2003
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I believe that under ICAO rules, one can fly a foreign-registered aircraft using one's national licence. (That came up once in Nigeria, when I had to look that up for some Nigerian-licenced pilots who did not want to fly a rather sketchy little Cessna with an N-registration. Try and guess who ended up doing the test flight?) As long as you stay within your national airspace you can fly any foreign-registered aircraft on your national licence. Once you go international, though, then you would need the appropriate national licence for the aircraft's state of registry.

In other words, the accident pilot, a Mexican national flying in Mexico on his Mexican licence, was perfectly legal to operate an N-registered aircraft within Mexico. The assumption is that he had the Lear 25 on his Mexican licence.

This accident will probably turn out to be a big mess in terms of legalities if all the t's have not been crossed and all the i's dotted. It would have to be something like the accident aircraft really being demo'ed for sale, which seems pretty unlikely, or else that it was properly leased to a Mexican operator, because, at first glance, there's no way the American owner could have a Mexican national on their roster to fly on their 135 certificate.

As someone else has alluded to, you can get away with a lot of things by showing a green ID card in various third-world countries, one with a picture of one of our presidents; that gets you out of trouble with local officials. Now, though, after such a high-profile accident, all bets are off.

My bet is that the Mexican authorities shall be shocked, absolutely shocked, to discover that some corners were cut by the owner and the operator of the accident aircraft, when even figuring out exactly who those are is going to be a great mystery.

Edited to add: I use AOL, when part of that is this stupid Huffpost, all those bits of news such as "Boy trapped in refrigerator eats own foot!" So there was a snippet about how the registered address for Starwood Aviation is a post office box in a strip mall next to a tuxedo shop.

We don't have to guess who the flight crew were, at least.

"What went wrong?" is another question easily solved, at least by all the armchair aviators who always come out of the wrinkled fruit's woodwork. "The pilot was too old!" is a very good start, of course. Then there is CFIT, sort of, given that the machine did seem to have suffered some sort of collision with the terrain, yes. The definitive answer is a long way off, at least a year until the full Mexican accident report, assuming one ever comes. Meanwhile, we can settle back here and let our amateur experts get to work sifting all the possibilities.

Last edited by chuks; 14th Dec 2012 at 15:15.
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