Small Plane from Miami to West Palm Beach

The main runway here is 10,001 feet by 150, which is an airliner runway, and beside it runs a second strip of 3,214 feet by 75 kept for general aviation. That second one is why an airport this size is still a comfortable arrival in a small aircraft. You are not sequenced behind departing airline traffic and you are not parked at a terminal: the aircraft comes to a general aviation apron, the door opens onto tarmac and the car is already there through ground transport. It is also the closest of the three fields to the bridges across to the island. It is the one to ask for when somebody in the party is connecting off an airline flight the same day, because that happens on one airport rather than on two with a drive in between.

Palm Beach County Park Airport at Lantana has three runways in a triangle, the longest of them 3,489 feet, and no control tower at all. Untowered means the arrival is as calm as a field gets: no sequencing, no airline traffic and almost no ground movement to wait for. It is the shorter drive if the day is happening south towards Lake Worth Beach, Delray or Boca, and it is the one guests notice as being unlike an airport in every way that matters. Ask for it by name at the enquiry if a calm arrival matters more to you than the last few minutes of driving. It is a short field by airline standards and an ordinary one for this aircraft.

North Palm Beach County General Aviation Airport sits about twelve nautical miles northwest of the city with two paved runways of 4,300 feet each. It is purely a general aviation field, which is the point of it. If the day is at PGA National, in Juno, or up at Jupiter with its inlet and its lighthouse, landing here takes twenty minutes of driving out of the afternoon compared with coming into the international. The choice is made at the quote, against where you are actually going, not on the morning. It is also the newest of the three, opened in 1994, and the one most guests have never heard of until they land on it. Purely general aviation means no airline schedule to work around at either end of the day.

Palm Beach itself is a barrier island, so everything on it is reached by bridge from the mainland. From the apron at the international it is a short drive and one crossing. 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 onto the water instead take the seaplane and skip the bridge entirely. We quote both against each other rather than selling one. Everything else on the island sits within a few minutes of that first bridge, the hotels, the clubs and the ocean road among them, so the drive does not get longer once you are across.

The street was named in 1913 for General William Jenkins Worth and turned into what it is now by Addison Mizner and Paris Singer, who put the Everglades Club at its western end in 1918 and gave the whole avenue its Mediterranean look. The part worth walking is off the street rather than on it. Mizner cut Via Mizner in 1923 and Via Parigi beside it, narrow pedestrian courtyards of shops and staircases and planted walls that read more like a village than a shopping street. It is four blocks end to end, which makes it an afternoon rather than a day, and that is exactly the shape of trip this aircraft is for. The Everglades Club still closes the western end, so the street stops rather than fades out, and why the four blocks read as one piece instead of a row of shops.

Whitehall is the 75-room house Henry Flagler finished in 1902 as a wedding gift and is now the Flagler Museum, a National Historic Landmark on the island itself. The Norton Museum of Art is the mainland counterpart, founded in 1941 and holding more than 8,200 works across European, American, Chinese and contemporary collections. Between them they are the reason a wet afternoon up here is not a wasted one, and both are a short drive from any of the three fields. They sit close enough together that guests with an afternoon rather than a full day usually pick one, walk it properly and leave the other for the next time they come up.

The Intracoastal runs the length of the city and the marina and refit yards along it are a working part of the place rather than scenery. A good share of what we arrange on this route is not tourism at all: owners going 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 runways under island logistics, 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 eighteen holes on the ocean side of the island are the oldest golf course in Florida. Alexander H. Findlay laid out the original links in 1896, which is earlier than most of the state's tourism industry, and the course has been rebuilt on the same ground since. It is the single most common reason a party flies up with more baggage than they would otherwise carry, and it is the argument for wheels in one sentence: a set of clubs each is a weight conversation on this aircraft and a genuine problem on a smaller one.

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 seventy-one 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 West Palm 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.