How does immigration/customs work for private jets?

Factual Questions
1

When I fly international on a commercial airliner, the whole passenger arrival process is tightly orchestrated: you get off the plane, and the only place you can possibly go is the immigration area - and after that, customs. There’s just no other place you can go without smashing a window or jumping a fence, which presumably will result in your prompt apprehension by people with blunt instruments, nasty chemicals, and a lot of latitude to put them to use.

I’ve never flown on a private jet, and probably never will. What little I know of their usage comes from TV shows and movies, which show international passengers getting off the jet, into a car, and being driven the last mile to their destination. Presumably in real life these people have to go through immigration/customs at some point, but where? Do these jets park at a terminal with those facilities, or do they park at a private hangar and then get driven to I/C? If they get driven, how are they compelled to go through I/C instead of just driving right out of the airport? Are I/C facilities for private-jet passengers staffed all the time, or just when one of these jets is arriving?

2

Our small city, which is 20 miles from a major metro area, has an small airport regularly used by private jets.

Several years ago the city build a separate immigration and customs building at the airport, so jets could fly directly from overseas.

It is my understanding that when used, the user of the private jet have to arrange for (and pay) immigration and customs officials to staff the facility.

Last time I asked the building had been used once.

I am doubtful this was the best use of city resources.

3

Well here’s one pitched right down the middle at me. I’ve flown private jets for some years now, although I’m probably transitioning out of the industry.

It depends. Some airports that are typical international destinations for private jets (Teterboro, for example) have dedicated customs facilities. After landing we taxi there, shut down engines and wait for an officer to come out to us. They then process the passengers and crew there, or sometimes have us go inside. Then we start up again and taxi to the jet terminal (called an FBO, short for fixed base operator). Occasionally, the FBO will have sent over a shuttle bus for the passengers, but we still have to move the airplane away from the customs building.

At airports without that facility a couple of things can happen. We can get customs to send agents over to our airport of intended landing. That requires advance notice and the hours and availability can vary. I once had to divert from JFK to Farmindgale on Long Island at the last moment because of weather. My company had to hustle to get customs over to meet us, which was not a sure thing. It worked out, but could have been a major nuisance. In other cases we may be forced to land at another airport to clear customs, then continue to the final destination.

It’s mostly the same in other countries, except some places are super strict. I never know whether we are allowed to open the aircraft door after shutdown because some places go absolutely ape if you do. So we keep it closed, which often results in an officer knocking on the door asking why we haven’t opened it. Which is to say, it’s not really standardized.

One time I flew a guy from Bermuda to New Orleans and they wanted us to go inside to meet customs as if we were a commercial flight. They had us block into an airline gate, which I found funny and thrilled my partner because he had never been an airline pilot. That was weird.

But in the end, passengers and crew are subject to the same process and customs agents definitely to not have a sense of humor about lapses. I know of a crew that took people from NY to Greece, not knowing one passenger forgot their passport (usually we check before departure). They got there, the guy was detained in an office while the crew got their required rest, then they had to take him right back to NY.

Also knew of a crew that just plain forgot to go to customs after landing. They dropped off their pax at the FBO as usual and went to the hotel. Customs was not amused and all sorts of hell was raised.

4

What does “block” mean in this context?

5

I recall reading some discussion about Richie-Rich types and their private jets for personal flights. Usually if a person is that rich, they have a minion whose job is to expedite. They collect passports, fill out forms, etc. and when the plane lands, they take it all to customs. Someone writing about their experience mentioned they often never saw the customs people personally.

(I often wondered about stories like Epstein taking underage girls across the ocean without some customs guy asking dozens of questions - but apparently some low level bureaucrats know better than to disturb people who have friends in high places.)

6

Pretty much means assigned - “park your aircraft at gate A1 and enter the terminal from there”

7

Sorry - pilot jargon for “park”.

It comes from the distinction between “flight time” (time the aircraft is actually airborne) and “block time” (which begins when the airplane moves out of it’s parking space to begin a flight and ends once parked at the destination).

These are logged in different ways. Pilots enter block time into their logs, whereas flight time is used for a lot of maintenance purposes.

8

I don’t know if that happens, but I’ve never seen it. I suppose someone else could fill out the forms, but in my experience each passenger ends up face to face with a customs officer at some point.

9

I have flown private internationally a handful of times. In each case, a customs and immigration agent met us on the tarmac parked, boarded the plane and we handed all of our passports to the agent, who did a cursory review of the pictures and confirming each of us was accounted for. We were then released and the plane moved to the FBO (fixed based operator) where we deplaned got our luggage and left.

10

Before a bunch of backwards southern senators forced us to sell our private planes, we used to use them a lot. For about a year I was flying between DTW and HMO a lot.

We had our own terminal at DTW from which we departed and arrived.

On the HMO end, we used the non-passenger terminal adjacent to the main terminal, which handled customs pretty much the same way as a passenger terminal did.

The trip home, though, has us landing at El Paso and parking walking distance to the customs and immigration window. We’d drop the ladder, a uniformed officer would board and issue instructions, and we’d get off the plane, walk to the window, and give the officer our passports and customs declaration.

We’d line up near the ladder, and sometimes they’d walk a dog near us, but usually not. Then we’d get the okay to board, take off (with fresh, box lunches from a local shopping mall restaurant), and land in our private terminal, get off the plane, and walk no more than 50 meters to our cars, and drive home.

This was almost always a Fokker F70 – in fact, I think ours was the very first F70 ever delivered.

Those were the days.

11

For those wondering, DTW = Detroit Wayne Metro, the big main airline airport in Detroit. And HMO = Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. Site of many auto-industry plants.

Hey @Balthisar, I’ve taxiied past your outfit’s private terminal umpteen times, albeit not recently. Back in the day it was fun to admire some of the air machines they had. It was clear which were for the mere engineers / managers and which were for the Royalty.

As to “blocks” or “block-in” and “block-out” …

That is an oblique and antique reference to the “chocks” that were / are placed alongside wheels to prevent parked airplanes from rolling away. Airplane wheels are free-rolling, there’s no transmission to put into gear or into “Park”. And early airplanes had no way to apply the brakes indefinitely. Even now brakes can be locked reliably only for a few hours before the hydraulic pressure fades away. The only way to stop them from rolling away was to block the wheels with an obstacle or tie / chain the airplane to the ground. For bigger airplanes (IOW ~WW-II size and up) the tying down is mostly impractical, so blocking the wheels became the norm.

At one time those were “parking blocks”. And “blocks out” was the command to remove those obstacles so taxi could begin. Which was the regulatory beginning of the actual flight. Likewise “block-in” was when the obstacles were placed adjacent to the wheels and the flight came to an official end.

As @Llama_Llogophile said, those terms survive in that we call commencement of movement “block-out”, stopping movement “block-in”, and the intervening interval is “block time” or just “block” when the context is clear. e.g. “Today I flew one leg: 2:34 air, 2:57 block.”

[aside]
@Llama_Llogophile: What’s all this about impending job / industry change? PM if you’d rather.

12

Near Detroit. It’s actually many miles away from the city. But I suppose the signs there say “Welcome to Detroit” and not “Welcome to Romulus”. It’s been a long time since I’ve flown anywhere though, so I can’t say for sure.

13

Didn’t he take most of those girls from the U.S. mainland to the U.S. Virgin Islands?

14

So if a pilot has, say, 2000 hours in type, is that flight time only, or is block time included in the total?

15

Yeah. I might better have said “… the main airport serving greater Detroit.” Actually rather few of the main airports in the major US metro cites are actually within the Big Named City limits. They’re more commonly in some suburban community or unincorporated county or …

Having flown in and out of DTW semi-regularly for 30+ years I’ve never set foot outside of beautiful Romulus MI. The closest I’ve ever gotten to Detroit city proper is looking down at it while maneuvering for landing.

That’s pretty typical.

US military standard is air time only. FAA standard is block-to-block. When a US military pilot converts to civilian status there’s an approved fudge factor to apply for the missing ground time in their military logs.

16

PM sent.

17

I’ve traveled to ~10 countries outside the US via private jet, some of those countries multiple times, all scattered across Europe, South America and SE Asia.

Most often when we arrived we’d be picked up by a bus and then brought directly to a security checkpoint of our own, which was the usual conveyor belt & metal detector, and our passports and bags would be scanned there. Other times they wouldn’t even run the bags through, just scan the passports. The countries are starting to blend together a bit now that I’ve been retired a while, but I do remember thinking that the long bus ride around Bangkok’s airport to the security checkpoint took longer when we arrived by private jet than it did going commercial through the terminal.

Arriving back in the US, we’d pull up short of the hangar, and there was a…how do I describe this…air-conditioned shack?..in the outfield…where some dusty old guy spent his days waiting for people like us, and then doing that jovial tough-guy routine. He was there for years, and everyone dreaded him because he made dumb/slightly threatening jokes, and could make us wait as long as he wanted while he went off an scanned our passports, so everyone was nice to him. But he was kind of a dick.

Oh, and we’d switch out pilots for longer flights, usually in either Helsinki or Berlin, so they’d park us in an off-to-the-side facility. I liked Helsinki because it often had other interesting travelers (sometimes Russian pilots), and there was also an old Finnish museum piece war plane you could check out on the tarmac.

18

Before 9/11, when things were pretty informal (you didn’t need a passport to enter Canada–or to return to the US, my brother flew his family of five up to Montreal in the private plane he owned. He landed in Dorval and was directed to wherever private planes parked and I was able to drive right up to it and pick them up. I guess there must have been some control but it was pretty loose. I’m sure things are different now.

19

Seems like there’s much more potential for passport fraud or someone with a warrant to slip through, then. AIUI, not only do the scans performed by immigration officers at the regular checkpoints do a much better job of detecting fake or anomaly passports, but they are also checked against the nationwide database for outstanding arrest warrants.

If the agent is just glancing at your passports, he wouldn’t be able to tell if one of you had a warrant for your arrest.

20

@Machine_Elf , this 2011 thread might interest you – the first 25 posts or so get to what you’re asking in the OP. I see that @Llama_Llogophile contributed several posts to that one, as well.