Fierro’s visits to Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica were of a pattern with his Cuban experience–two to four days of ceremonies, banquets and official meetings, and then an aerial escort to the border. Coming down at San José de Costa Rica, Fierro found Las Sabanas airport so overrun with spectators that he was afraid to land. Then he spotted a cart track along the edge of the field. Too late he realized that what looked like minor ruts from the air were deep furrows, which caught his wheels, forcing one off its axle and bringing the plane to an abrupt stop. Mounted staff officers came galloping over and brought the shaken flier to the reception platform to meet the president.

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After four days in Costa Rica, during which two new wheels were fabricated for BC-2, Fierro flew on to Panama, where he was met with a warm reception from the American military authorities in the Canal Zone. He always remembered the toast an American colonel offered at a banquet in his honor: ‘I wish not that you be the world’s best pilot, but rather the oldest pilot.’ (Fierro, who rose to command the Mexican air force, died in 1978 at age 81.)

The Mexican ambassador was enthusiastic about Fierro’s plan to fly on to Spain. But word soon came that Fierro must return home immediately. Heartsick, Fierro blamed the change on shock at Carranza’s death. ‘As a soldier,’ he wrote in frustration, ‘I had no other alternative than to obey, and returned.’

To Fierro, his arrival September 9 seemed ‘practically a surprise.’ Although the president, key cabinet officers and his flying friends greeted him, few spectators had turned out, in contrast to his May arrival from Mexicali. ‘Months later the government of the Republic rewarded me for the successful execution of my flight abroad,’ Fierro commented acerbically, ‘giving me in solemn ceremony the Medal For Aeronautical Merit–second class.’ (In 1957 the Fédération Aéronautique Internacionale awarded General Roberto Fierro its Paul Tissandier diploma ‘for his pioneering flights and his nonstop flights from Mexicali to Mexico City, and from Mexico City to Havana, in an airplane of Mexican manufacture.’)

By early 1930, the public was again interested in speed and distance record flights. Fierro proposed a New York-Mexico City-Natal-Dakar-Madrid flight, with the first leg flown nonstop in honor of Emilio Carranza. The government agreed to let him go, but as it was already sponsoring Lt. Col. Pablo Sidar’s Mexico City-Buenos Aires goodwill flight, declined to provide any financial support. Fierro resorted to public subscription, recruiting three friends for a support committee. Journalist Manuel Ramírez Cárdenas managed publicity, raising $35,000 in less than 20 days. Gustavo Espinosa Mireles, vice president of the Compañía Mexicana de Aviación, arranged a course in instrument navigation for Fierro at Mexicana’s Brownsville, Texas, base. And Adán Gálvez Pérez, a flier and Fierro’s former army pal, handled everything else.

Fierro assumed he would fly BC-2 until he learned it had crashed March 19 on a nonstop flight from Mexicali to Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico’s two most distant state capitals. ‘Stunned by that sad end of my ‘little cockroach’,’ as he recalled, Fierro opted for a Lockheed Sirius–Lindbergh’s choice for his Pacific route explorations for Pan American Airways.

Fierro was at Brownsville when he learned that Sidar and his co-pilot had crashed off Costa Rica on the highly publicized Buenos Aires flight, killing both aboard. On his last day of classes, a message arrived telling him to drop everything and return. ‘But the telegram was drafted in such terms,’ he recalled, ‘that it was not at all difficult for me to figure out that the committee didn’t really feel that I should obey the order.’ He headed straight to the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, near Los Angeles, where he kept a low profile for the 25 days it took for the Sirius to be completed. After flight-testing the aircraft himself (Lockheed’s test pilot had been killed that same week), Fierro christened it Anáhuac. He paid General Manager Carl Squier $30,000 for the plane, special instrumentation, two parachutes and $50,000 life insurance policies on himself and his mechanic, Arnulfo Cortés, for the New York-Mexico City flight.

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