Small Plane Flights from Miami to Norman's Cay

The strip is laid out 03/21 and measures about 4,700 feet of asphalt with water at both ends. From the air it looks like somebody drew a line across the cay, because that is more or less what it is: the island is a few hundred yards wide in most places and the runway takes up the middle of it.

There is no terminal, no desk and no queue. You come off the aircraft onto the apron and you are on the island, which is the part of this route people are least prepared for. Customs and immigration were handled at a port of entry on the way in, so nothing here is a formality.

Say at the enquiry if you want a cart standing at the apron. It is arranged with the flight through ground transport rather than found on arrival, because there is no rank to walk to.

A cay of this size has no business owning 4,700 feet of asphalt. The reason it does is that between 1978 and the early eighties Carlos Lehder ran the island as a staging post for the Medellin cartel and lengthened the strip to roughly a thousand metres to take heavier aircraft.

That period ended a long time ago and the island has been quiet, private and entirely ordinary ever since. What survived it is a runway far better than the cay would otherwise have, so a charter can land here at all rather than putting you down forty miles away.

MacDuff's sits on the island as restaurant, cottages and the reason most day trips have a fixed point in the middle of them. There is a marina as well, which is where the boats that run out to the wreck and the sandbars start.

The distances here are the argument for this route. On islands where the airport sits on a separate landmass the first hour of the day goes on a taxi and a ferry. Here the walk from the apron is short enough that guests do it with a bag over one shoulder.

What there is to do once you are on the ground is the island's own subject rather than the flight's, and the Norman's Cay destination page covers it properly. Guests who want a table held before they land add a fly and dine day and anything outside the usual list goes to custom requests.

A Curtiss C-46 Commando went into shallow water off the cay in November 1980 and has been there since, wings still attached, in water shallow enough that snorkellers and divers look at the same thing from different depths.

It is close to the end of the island the runway points at, so it is usually seen from the air on the way in before anybody gets into the water. Boats out to it start from the marina and the trip is measured in minutes.

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.

Dive tanks, golf clubs, rods, a cooler for the boat, 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. It is the reason a strip on a cay this small matters to the houses on it as much as to the visitors.

Norman's Cay is the northern end of the Exumas rather than the middle of them, and Highbourne Cay sits about eight miles up the chain with Allen's Cay and its rock iguanas a little beyond that.

You fly along this line on the way in, so the geography makes sense before you land rather than afterwards. A boat from the marina reaches the nearer cays in an afternoon, and an aircraft reaches the further ones in minutes, which is what turns a single island into island hopping.

The park begins at Shroud Cay, about five miles south, and runs for 176 square miles down the chain. It was founded in 1958 and has been a no-take reserve since 1986, so the water and the reef inside it look the way they do from the air.

Norman's Cay sits just outside the northern boundary, which is the useful position: you are next to it rather than inside its rules. Boats run in from the marina and the Bahamas destinations page puts the rest of the chain in order.

Norman's Cay works as the first leg of a longer trip as easily as it works as the whole day, and the reason is the clearance: once you are through customs on the way in, every leg after it is domestic. The same airframe carries on south and east to Staniel Cay, Exuma, Nassau, Harbour Island or Andros.

That is what turns one cay into a wider Bahamas day. Where the next island has no strip of its own, that leg switches aircraft rather than cancelling the plan. The packaged version of a single day is the Norman's Cay getaway day trip, and the same cay by water landing is the seaplane route.