Small Plane Flights from Miami to Paradise Island

The field lies on the western side of New Providence with two paved runways across it, the longer of them eleven thousand feet. From the seat it is an ordinary landing, because a small aircraft uses a fraction of that, and the apron for private movements is nowhere near the terminal the airlines use.

Customs and immigration are on the field, which is the fact that shapes this whole route: you clear where you land rather than somewhere along the way, and this is the busiest border in the country, so the desk is staffed rather than summoned.

Expect the formalities to take minutes rather than an hour. The crew has filed everything before departure and the desk keeps daytime hours, which is the one reason an early slot is worth more than a late one. Say at the enquiry if anyone is travelling on a passport other than a United States one, because that is the case worth flagging before the day.

Two bridges arch across the harbour between New Providence and the island, one for each direction, and every arrival by air ends on one of them. The drive from the apron is about half an hour, longer when the harbour road is busy in the middle of the day.

It is worth knowing before you book rather than after. This is not a taxi to the door: the flight ends at an airport on another island, and the last piece is a road. A car waiting on the apron when the door opens is arranged with the flight as ground transport rather than found on arrival.

The view from the top of the bridge is the moment most people put a phone up: the harbour underneath, the cruise berths on one side and the marina on the other, and the island opening out ahead.

The island had an airport of its own until 1999. A strip of three thousand feet ran across the eastern end and small planes came in over the water from Florida with the resorts a few minutes' drive away. It closed, the runway was lifted and an eighteen hole course was laid over the ground it stood on, hemmed in by houses.

If you look east out of the window on the approach you are looking at where aircraft used to land, which is a small thing to know and it explains the shape of the day better than anything else on this page.

What replaced it is the field at Nassau, which is a considerably better runway with a border desk on it. The trade is the drive, and on this route it is the only trade there is.

The eastern half of the island is one resort complex and it is the reason most people come. Open water lagoons with rays and sharks in them, a marine habitat you can walk through below the waterline, slides and a river circuit that takes most of an afternoon.

Day passes exist for guests who are not staying, and they are bought at the resort rather than through us. What matters for the flight is only the timing: a full day here and a same day return means an early departure out of Miami and a late one back, which is exactly the shape a charter is good at and a schedule is not.

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

The ocean side of the island is one long beach. Cabbage Beach runs about two miles along the northern shore and is the busiest stretch, with the resorts behind it and water sports for hire along the sand. Paradise Beach at the western end is roughly a mile and quieter with it.

Every beach in the Bahamas is public, so the length of it is open to you whether or not you are staying at anything behind it. Walk five minutes from where the loungers stop and it thins out fast.

You see the whole of it from the air on the way in, which is the part guests remember: two miles of pale sand with the deep water going navy a few hundred yards out.

The harbour side of the island is where the boats are. The marina takes vessels up to two hundred and forty feet, which makes it the deepest berth in the country, and a charter arriving by air to join a boat here is one of the more common shapes this route takes.

Underneath the bridge on the New Providence side is Potter's Cay, a row of stalls where the local boats land and conch is cleaned in front of you. It is ten minutes from the resort strip and about as far from it as anywhere on the harbour gets.

Freight and provisions for a boat travel on the same runway as the passengers under island logistics, which is a different service rather than a charter with extra bags.

There is a ferry terminal on the island and a boat across the harbour takes about ten minutes, which is often quicker than the bridge when the road is full. It runs through the day at half hour intervals.

It puts you in the old town rather than at the airport end of the island: the straw market, the forts on the hill above the harbour and the streets behind them.

Most guests do it once in an afternoon and take a car back. Where you are going after that is on the Nassau page, which is the same crossing sold to somebody whose day ends on the other island.

Clearing in at Nassau is what makes the rest of a longer trip easy: once you are through the desk, every leg after it is domestic and none of them involves a border again. The same airframe carries on north and south to Harbour Island, Grand Bahama, Andros or Staniel Cay and the Exumas.

That is what turns one island into island hopping or 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 Paradise Island getaway day trip and the rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page.