Last week while flying a short leg from Van Nuys (near L.A.) to San Diego, California we received a strange clearance. It was “KVNY BURP30B KSAN.” I must have had a perplexed look on my face as I was looking at the map on my Foreflight iPad. My First Officer directed me to click on the BURP30B on the Foreflight App, and after receiving a dropdown menu, click again on the Expand BURP30B option. This option displayed the expanded Burbank 30B route as follows: “KVNY Rwy 16R DCT TWINE V518 KIMMO V459 SLI DCT LAX/118/25 DCT CARDI DCT MZB DCT KSAN Rwy 27.” Wow! This short 141 NM trip had almost as many airways and waypoints as my next leg did which was to New York. In addition to the number of airways and waypoints I was surprised by the “LAX/118/25” in the routing. It had been a long time since I had to enter a Place, Bearing, and Distance into a route. I am sure the last time I did this had to be in a flight simulator at FlightSafety International. With the help of a sharp FO/SIC we eventually were able to get the clearance entered in the FMS and briefed our plan. The most difficult part for me was remembering the Place, Bearing, Distance format. Foreflight displayed it as “LAX/118/25”. But there is no slash between the Place and Bearing. It should be entered into the FMS as “LAX118/25.”
This clearance turned out to be one of those “Tower Enroute Control” or “TEC” Route clearances you may have heard mentioned a long time ago in ground school. More information can be found in the Chart Supplement (formerly Airport/Facility Directory). The Tower Enroute Control Routes are listed in Foreflight under Documents, FAA, Chart Supplement (AFD), Tower Enroute Control Routes (at the bottom of the stack).
We were assigned the “Newhall 1 Departure, TWINE, as filed” out of Van Nuys. After taking off from runway 16R we made a turn to the left following the departure and were eventually cleared “on-course” after some vectoring. The weather had low ceilings all along the departure coast. This prohibited us from seeing the usual beautiful view of the mountains and Pacific Ocean.
Since the airports were closely spaced, and we were assigned a TEC route, we would not receive a published arrival into KSAN. As we neared San Diego, we received vectors to the RNAV Y 27 Approach. This approach has a slightly steeper glide path of 3.5 degrees requiring a steeper descent than normal and offers LP and LNAV Minimums. Of course, landing on Runway 27 with a long rollout requires a left turn off to the airline side of the airport, and a long taxi with a runway crossing to get to Signature Aviation. On the positive side we were able to watch a great airshow as Southwest and many other airlines were flying over the city of San Diego to land on Runway 27. We were also in perfect position to “judge” their landings.
As is often the case when you see something, it pops up again. A few days later we had a flight from Ft Lauderdale, FL to John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, CA. After dropping off passengers we reposition the airplane from KSNA to KSBA Santa Barbara, CA 135 miles up the coast that required a flight around Los Angeles Airport. This time we filed the Costal CSTP28 TEC route. I was much quicker to decipher the route as “KSNA SXC V208 VTU KWANG KSBA”.
We are not having much success finding sunshine on this trip. The California coastline is still overcast, and Florida was having torrential rains. We headed to the Caribbean the next day, where we finally had better luck. We had just escaped Florida where Ft Lauderdale received a record breaking 13.4 inches of rain in 24-hour period and we received record breaking delays.
