Small Plane Flights from Miami to Pompano Beach

The field has three paved runways crossing each other, the longest 4,918 feet by 150 and the shortest still generous for this aircraft. Two of them almost always give a landing straight into the wind. It is a general aviation field and has been since the city took it over in 1947, which is the part guests notice.

There is no airline schedule to be sequenced behind, no terminal to walk through and no baggage hall. The aircraft comes to a ramp, the door opens onto tarmac and the car is already there through ground transport. Two fixed base operators work the field, so there is somewhere to sit and somewhere to leave a car for the day.

Ask for this one unless something about your day argues otherwise. It is the shortest drive to almost anywhere on this stretch of coast, and on a flight of thirty-odd miles the drive is the part worth optimising.

Goodyear leases about thirty-two acres on the field for one of the three airship bases it keeps in the country, with a hangar of roughly forty-five thousand square feet. Which means the taxi in is not like the taxi in anywhere else.

The airship is either moored on the grass with its nose on the mast or out over the beach, and it is a great deal bigger up close than it looks from a stadium. Guests with children have been known to ask for the slot that gets them there while it is still on the ground.

It is not a museum and there is nothing to book. It is simply what sits beside the ramp you park on, and it is the reason this field is remembered when a general aviation apron normally is not.

Fort Lauderdale Executive has two paved runways, the main one 6,002 feet by 100 and a second of 4,000 feet, and it is one of the busiest general aviation fields in the state. It is the one to ask for when the day is happening south rather than north, towards Fort Lauderdale itself, Las Olas or the port.

It is also the sensible choice when the party is larger and the airframe is bigger, because more runway is never a disadvantage and this field has the services to match. The drive north to Pompano Beach from there is a quarter of an hour.

The town has its own page at Fort Lauderdale, and the same field is the departure end of a run in the other direction under Fort Lauderdale to Pompano Beach.

Boca Raton Airport has a single paved runway of 6,276 feet by 150 and is purely general aviation, sitting just inland of the coast road. If the day is at the north end, in Deerfield Beach, Lighthouse Point or Boca itself, landing here takes twenty minutes of driving out of the afternoon compared with coming into the Airpark.

It is a quieter field than Executive and a bigger one than the Airpark, which makes it the useful middle option when the party is large and the destination is north. The choice between the three is made at the quote, against where you are actually going, never on the morning. Boca Raton has its own page for what is there.

Atlantic Boulevard runs east from the field to the ocean and is the only direction most parties need. The beach is a few minutes away rather than a journey. This is the step people underestimate when they compare a runway with a water landing.

It exists, it is short, and it is the price of arriving on wheels with whatever you are carrying. Guests who would rather step off directly onto the water take the seaplane instead and skip the car altogether. We quote both against each other rather than selling one.

Everything along the front sits within a few minutes of that road once you are on it, the hotels, the restaurants and the pier among them, so the drive does not get longer once you have made the turn.

The lighthouse at Hillsboro Inlet has been working since 1907 and throws one of the strongest beams on the eastern seaboard, visible something like twenty-eight nautical miles out. You see it from the air on the way in on almost every flight, an iron skeleton tower on the north side of a narrow cut with boats queuing to get through it.

On the ground it is not open to visitors, but the preservation society runs tours on published dates through the year and keeps a small museum in a park nearby, open in the middle of the day.

The inlet itself is the boundary between Pompano Beach and Lighthouse Point and the reason the charter fleet sits where it does. It is ten minutes north of the Airpark by car.

The Intracoastal runs the length of the town and the marinas and yards along it are a working part of the place rather than scenery. A good share of what we fly on this run is not a day out at all: owners coming up to see a boat, crew joining or leaving one, and parts that have to be there tomorrow rather than next week.

That last one rides the same runway under island logistics and as cargo, and a yacht at the far end can be met directly through yacht transfers.

A car on the apron and a driver who already knows which yard you want is the difference between a morning and a whole day, and like everything else on the ground it is arranged with the flight rather than after it.

The return is the part that makes this a day rather than a trip. Nothing here runs to a published schedule, so the aircraft leaves when you are ready. That is the whole argument for doing thirty-five miles in the air rather than on I-95: not the minutes saved in the middle, but the fact that neither end of the day is decided by anybody else.

Tell us at the enquiry if you would rather stay the night and a Pompano Beach day becomes a weekend instead. The crew is told your intended return at the quote and the aircraft is held for it, so an afternoon that runs long is a message rather than a problem.