Small Plane from Miami to Melbourne Florida

Melbourne Orlando International is the city's own field in Brevard County, two miles northwest of downtown and 33 feet above the sea. Three asphalt strips, the longest of them 10,181 by 150 feet, a control tower and a general aviation side that sits away from the scheduled gates. From the seat it is an ordinary landing and from the apron it is a short walk. There is no concourse to cross and no baggage hall to wait in, so the car booked with the flight is standing where the aircraft parks. Guests who are used to arriving here on a scheduled service tend to notice the difference before they notice the runway: the whole arrival is over in the time it usually takes to reach a carousel.

Melbourne kept two separate old centres rather than one, and both are within a short drive of the field. Historic downtown runs along New Haven Avenue with the shopfronts, the restaurants and the galleries still in the original buildings rather than in a rebuilt version of them. The Eau Gallie Arts District is the other, a few minutes north and directly on the water. Eau Gallie was one of the first settlements anybody made on this stretch of coast and is now murals, working studios and a riverfront square. Both are close enough to the apron that a party landing at eleven is sitting down to lunch before noon, which is the part of the day a charter actually buys you.

The barrier island sits directly across the lagoon from the field, and the causeways make it a short drive rather than an outing. Indian Harbour Beach, Satellite Beach and Melbourne Beach run one into the next down the strip of sand, with parks and public accesses instead of a wall of towers. What people notice first is how empty they are. This is the uncrowded half of the Space Coast, and on a weekday outside the season you can walk a long way without meeting anybody at all. Further south the Archie Carr refuge protects 20.5 miles of shoreline between Melbourne Beach and Wabasso Beach, the most important loggerhead nesting stretch in the world, so that end of the sand stays dark and quiet by design.

Brevard Zoo is the one thing on this coast that reliably decides a family's day, and it is a few minutes from the apron. More than 900 animals in open-air habitats, a deck where you feed the giraffes and paddling routes that run through the enclosures not around them. It is worth knowing about before you pick the hour of the flight rather than after it, because a party that wants a full morning there is a party that wants an early block out of Miami. That is the sort of thing a scheduled timetable decides for you and a charter does not. Say it in the first message and the departure time is planned around the zoo rather than the zoo around the departure time.

Melbourne sits at the southern end of the 72 miles of shoreline the state calls the Space Coast. The pads are at the northern end of that same stretch, so a launch is a drive up the coast from here rather than a flight to somewhere else entirely. The reason it matters for a charter is timing rather than distance. Launch windows move, sometimes by a day and sometimes by a week, and an aircraft you have chartered moves with them because nobody else is sitting on it. A booked seat does not. Several of the parties who fly this route deliberately leave the date loose in the first message for exactly that reason, and the quote comes back in that shape.

Sebastian Inlet State Park lies south of Melbourne Beach where the barrier island is cut through, and its breaks are the best known on this side of the state. First Peak and Monster Hole are the two names anybody who surfs this coast will recognise without being told where they are. The calmer water on the inlet side is the other half of it, used for swimming and snorkelling by people with no interest in a wave at all. Between the inlet, the quiet sand north of it and the protected nesting beaches further south, this end of the county is the reason a lot of parties fly past the busier stretches of Florida coast to get here rather than stopping short.

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 a great deal more of it to give than floats do, which is the practical reason some parties pick this silo over the water one. Boards for the inlet, rods, camera cases for a launch, a box of samples for a meeting on the mainland, 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. Anything larger than luggage is a different service on the same runway and that is island logistics rather than a charter with extra bags.

Melbourne works as one leg of a longer plan rather than only as an end point, and because the whole route stays inside Florida the aircraft can pick up and put down as often as the week needs it to, without anything between the legs except the flying itself. The same airframe runs the coast north to Daytona Beach and Jacksonville, south to Vero Beach, Stuart and West Palm Beach, or inland to Orlando. The full list is on the Florida destinations page. Where the plan wants a dock rather than a ramp, that leg switches aircraft instead of cancelling: the same trip by seaplane onto the lagoon. The packaged version of a single day is the Melbourne getaway day trip.