Small Plane Flights from Miami to San Salvador

The strip runs 10/28 across the west side of the island, 7,999 feet of asphalt at 24 feet above the sea. It is long enough for the airliners that serve San Salvador on a schedule, which means a small charter plane is never the thing the runway has to accommodate.

The terminal is one building. Customs and immigration are inside it, which is the fact that shapes this whole route: San Salvador Airport is an airport of entry, so you clear where you land rather than somewhere along the way. On a 374 mile crossing that saves a landing nobody wants.

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 the arrival time is planned rather than picked.

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 rather than at the counter.

Cockburn Town is the island's capital and it sits on the west coast within minutes of the runway. It is small: a waterfront, a handful of streets and the government buildings, with the settlements strung north and south along the same coast road.

That closeness is the practical argument for this island over most of the out islands. There is no channel to cross and no transfer to build into the plan, so the hours you bought are hours ashore. A cart or a car can be waiting at the apron through ground transport.

This is what most people come for. The shelf around San Salvador is narrow and the drop-off starts close in, in places as shallow as about forty feet before it falls away into open ocean.

There are more than fifty named sites and most of them are three to twenty minutes out by boat, which is unusual: on a lot of islands the diving is an hour each way. Here the wall is the near thing rather than the far one, so a morning and an afternoon in the water is an ordinary day rather than an expedition.

Gear is the reason this trip belongs on wheels. Tanks, weights and camera housings are a weight conversation on a small aircraft, not a shape problem, and the baggage guidance explains how that trade works.

San Salvador is generally held to be where Columbus first came ashore in the Americas on 12 October 1492, and Long Bay on the west coast is where that landfall is placed. It is a short run down the coast road from the airport.

A white cross put up in 1956 marks the spot, and an older monument left by the Chicago Herald expedition in 1891 stands nearby. The island carried the name Watling's Island for a long stretch in between, after the pirate John Watling, before it went back to the one Columbus gave it.

What there is to see once you are there is the island's own subject rather than the flight's, and the San Salvador destination page covers it properly. Anything you want arranged before you land, rather than found afterwards, goes to custom requests.

At the northeast corner of the island the lighthouse at Dixon Hill is one of the very few left anywhere that is still worked by hand, lit and turned the way it always was rather than by a motor.

The keeper takes visitors up. From the gallery you get the shape of the whole island at once, which is the same shape you saw from the aircraft on the way in: a thin rim of land wrapped around water.

Great Lake runs almost the length of the island down the middle, so San Salvador reads as a ring from the air. Before there were roads it was the road, and the settlements still sit along it. Around the edges are the flats and the shallow bays, Bonefish Bay among them, and beaches like Grotto Beach and Sandy Point where the sand moves with the season.

It is quiet water and there is a great deal of it. A guided day on the flats is arranged the same way anything else is, through flats fishing, and the rock iguana that lives here and almost nowhere else is a protected species you are asked to leave alone.

This is the part of the trip 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, weight belts, regulators, a camera housing, rods, a cooler for the boat: 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.

San Salvador works as the far end of a longer trip rather than as a stop on the way to anywhere, and clearing in here is what makes the rest of it easy: once you are through the desk at Cockburn Town, every leg after it is domestic.

Rum Cay is the near neighbour, and Long Island, Cat Island and the southern end of the chain are short hops on the same airframe with no further border. Further back towards Florida the same aircraft reaches Nassau, Harbour Island and Grand Bahama. That is what turns one island into island hopping rather than a there and back.

Where the next island has no strip of its own, that leg switches aircraft rather than cancelling the plan, and the same route by water is the seaplane to San Salvador. The rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page.