If you’re heading to heaven, you really should fly out of Palm Springs.
Pandemic-era air travel is a miserable combination of unhappy passengers and unreliable service — except in Palm Springs. There, flying still feels miraculous.
The airport is small and easily navigable. After you speed through security, you emerge into an outdoor desert garden that might be the best waiting room in American aviation.
And, if we’re lucky, sun-splashed, open-air PSP — the code by which this airport is known — will become a model for post-pandemic flight across California, and especially in the smaller airports of our growing inland regions.
PSP is already the people’s choice. While the pandemic has grounded the ambitions of the airlines and the larger travel industry, PSP has soared. 2021 was the busiest summer in the airport’s history. And since last June, the airport has set seven new monthly records for passengers; PSP now serves more than two million people annually.
Those records may keep falling. Southwest Airlines started service in Palm Springs in late 2020 and now flies from there to eight cities, including Sacramento and Oakland. Six other airlines have added flights, including American Airlines to Philadelphia, JetBlue to Fort Lauderdale, and, just last month, Aha! to Reno. The 13 passenger airlines serving the airport now offer 35 different routes — creating more competition and lowering fares, and surely making PSP even more popular.
In local news reports, airport officials have expressed surprise at this pandemic surge; they hadn’t projected a return to pre-COVID numbers until 2023. But this small airport, a former military base that the city of Palm Springs bought and converted six decades ago, has long found ways to succeed, even in hard times.
Indeed, PSP has prospered ever since the Great Recession, even as other…