Private Plane Charter Miami to Inagua

Everything about a trip this far south is decided by whether you have to stop somewhere first. A charter does not, and the day starts at the field beside the town rather than four hours earlier in a departure lounge. Matthew Town is the only settlement on the island and almost everything you came for is a drive from it.

That drive is worth arranging before you leave Florida rather than after you arrive, because there is no rank of cars waiting and no reason there should be. Ask for ground transport at the enquiry and it is standing there when the door opens.

From that point nothing is holding a return time over you, which on an island where the good hours are early and late is the whole difference.

The Inagua National Park covers 287 square miles, close to half the island, and has been protected since 1965. The Bahamas National Trust, which manages it, counts around 70,000 West Indian flamingos there, the largest breeding colony of the species anywhere in the world. They are birds, so they keep their own hours, and the ones worth flying for are at the start and the end of the day.

That is an argument for a chartered aircraft rather than a scheduled one in a single sentence: a departure at first light from Florida puts your party at the ponds while the light is still low, and a party that decides on the morning to stay for the evening simply tells us.

Access to the park itself runs through the Trust and its wardens rather than through us. Say at the enquiry that it is the reason for the trip and the day is built with the time in it.

The salt operation covers roughly 300,000 acres of the island and is one of the largest solar salt works in North America. Seawater is let into shallow ponds and left to the sun and the trade winds until what remains is salt.

It is also the reason the flamingos are here in these numbers. The same ponds grow the brine shrimp the birds feed on, so the industry and the colony are not two separate attractions but one system, which is a genuinely odd thing to be able to say about a working plant.

Tours run, and they run on the plant's terms rather than a visitor schedule. An aircraft that leaves when you are finished rather than at a published hour is what makes that easy to fit in.

The lighthouse on the southwestern point dates to 1870, stands 113 feet, and throws its light around 17 miles out over the Windward Passage. For more than a century it was worked by hand, which is the part people remember once they have climbed it.

On a clear day the eastern tip of Cuba is visible from this side of the island, around 55 miles across the water. It is an evening thing rather than a midday one, and evenings are exactly what a scheduled return flight takes away from you.

Union Creek Reserve is a tidal inland sea of just under 5,000 acres on the north coast, closed to fishing and used as a research site. Green turtles have been studied and tagged there by a team out of Florida since the 1970s, which makes it one of the longest running programmes of its kind in the region.

It is not a stop you improvise. Visits go through the Bahamas National Trust and they happen at the hours the tide and the wardens allow, so the flight gets planned around the visit . That ordering is only possible when the aircraft is yours.

Beyond the flamingos the island counts around 140 recorded species, so it is often called the birdwatching capital of the Bahamas. Two of them are the reason serious birders come this far: the Bahama parrot, which breeds on only two islands in the country, and the Inagua woodstar, a hummingbird found here and nowhere else.

Birding is an activity measured in early mornings and patience, and it does not survive contact with a connecting flight. A party that charters can spend three days on the island and leave on the fourth morning after one more walk, because the aircraft has no other obligation.

Great Inagua is 596 square miles, the southernmost inhabited island in the Bahamas, and the reason the water around it is the way it is has less to do with the water than with the distance. Very few people come this far, so very little gets used.

What a private aircraft adds here is the ability to treat the island as a base rather than a destination. Say what the days are meant to hold and the aircraft is on the ground for them, then takes you home on the hour you name rather than the one somebody published.

Great Inagua sits at the far end of a chain of islands that almost nothing flies to directly. Once your party is cleared in here, everything after it is domestic, and the fields along that chain take the same type of aircraft.

Spring Point on Acklins, Colonel Hill on Crooked Island, Duncan Town out on the Ragged Islands and the field on Mayaguana are all within reach, and none of them are on a timetable from Miami.

So a second island is a decision your group makes rather than a routing somebody sells you. Further north the same is true of Long Island, Staniel Cay and the Exumas and Nassau if the trip is running back that way.

That is the shape of an island hopping trip or a longer Bahamas day; a single island and back is an Inagua getaway day trip. The full list is on the Bahamas destinations page.