Small Plane from Miami to Daytona Beach

Three asphalt runways, the longest of them 10,500 feet, a tower and a general aviation ramp. The crosswind strip 16/34 runs 6,001 feet and the short parallel 07R/25L 3,195, so there is a usable surface here in almost any wind this coast produces. The field sits three miles southwest of the middle of town, which is closer in than most airports of that size manage. There is no concourse to walk and no baggage hall to wait in: you step off the aircraft onto the apron and the car is standing there. Nothing has to be cleared, because nothing was crossed. Miami and Daytona Beach are both in Florida, so the whole leg is domestic and the only filing on it is the flight plan. That is the part guests who fly our island routes notice first.

The Daytona International Speedway is the airport's immediate neighbour, which is an accident of geography that pays off four or five times a year. The track is a two-and-a-half mile tri-oval with thirty-one degrees of banking in the turns, steep enough that walking up it is difficult. On race weekends the roads into town are the slow part of any trip and the apron is a few hundred yards from the gates. That is the single clearest argument for arriving by air here rather than driving up, and it is the reason those dates book out earliest.

The beach runs about twenty-three miles and the sand is packed hard enough to drive on, which is what made the place famous long before the Speedway existed. Cars ran land speed records on this sand from the beginning of the century until the middle of the nineteen-thirties. Driving on it is still allowed on the marked stretches, sunrise to sunset in winter and eight to seven in summer, at ten miles an hour. Most parties never bother: the width of the beach at low tide is the point, not the driving. From the air on the way in it reads as a single pale band with the surf on one edge and the town on the other. What there is to do once you are on it is the town's own subject rather than the flight's, and the Daytona Beach destination page covers it properly.

Ormond Beach Municipal sits at the top of the same barrier island with two paved runways, 4,005 feet on 9/27 and 3,704 on 17/35. Comfortable for this aircraft and the shorter drive if the day is happening at the north end. Ormond is the quieter half of the same stretch of coast: older, more residential, and the place where the land speed record business actually started before it moved south. Guests staying up there land here rather than at the international field and save themselves twenty minutes of ground transport at each end of the day.

Spruce Creek is a private 4,000-foot paved runway inside a gated residential airpark of roughly 1,300 homes, with about fourteen miles of taxiway connecting the houses to it. It is the best known community of its kind anywhere and it sits ten minutes south of Daytona at Port Orange. For a guest staying inside it, that means being set down where they are sleeping rather than at an airport with a drive after it. Nowhere else on this coast offers that, and it is one of the genuine advantages of a wheeled aircraft over anything that needs water. Access is by permission of the airpark rather than by right, so it is arranged in advance. Say it in the first message and the crew sorts it out before the date rather than on the morning.

New Smyrna Beach Municipal is the field to the south, three paved runways with 5,000 feet on 7/25 and 4,319 on 11/29. It is the one to use when the day is about the inlet rather than the town. Ponce de Leon Inlet separates the two beaches and the lighthouse beside it is the tallest in Florida at 175 feet, 203 steps to the top, first lit in the eighteen-eighties. From the air it is the landmark that tells you the approach has started.

This is the part of the day a runway changes most. Load on a small aircraft is a weight question rather than a bag count, and a wheeled airframe has more of it to give than floats do. Golf clubs, boards, camera cases, a cooler, a case of something for the house: all of it travels, within the payload for the aircraft on the day. Say what is coming at the enquiry rather than at the ramp, and see the baggage guidance for how the trade between passengers and weight actually works. Anything larger than luggage is a different service on the same runway, and that is island logistics rather than a charter with extra bags.

Daytona works as the first leg rather than the whole day, and every leg after it is as simple as the first. The same airframe carries on inland to Orlando, which is about fifty-six road miles away and a few minutes by air, or south along the shoreline to Melbourne and the space coast and Vero Beach. North it is a short hop to Jacksonville. That is what turns one town into a scenic run up the coast. The packaged version of a single day is the Daytona Beach getaway day trip, and the rest of the state is on the Florida destinations page.