- Well, good morning from Miami, Florida.
And after a week of Netflix and chill
here at the airport hotel,
it's time to head out
and explore the great wide open of the US of A.
And we're starting in style today,
with a flight the length of Florida to Pensacola,
the airport with the airport code
of PNS International Airport.
So come with me then,
let's head across to Fort Lauderdale airport
and take a ride with Silver Airways
to PNS International Airport.
First step of course today,
was the all-important cup of coffee.
- Sugar or just black?
- No, just black please.
Need all the caffeine I can get.
- Like whiskey, huh?
- Whiskey in the evening,
coffee in the morning, yeah?
- Just straight black coffee.
- Thank you very much.
- You are welcome. - Thank you.
Next it was time to head to the airport.
One thing I love about staying in airport hotels
in the States is that they almost always
have a free airport shuttle running around the clock.
It wasn't long before we arrived
at Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport
to get my flight up to PNS.
To Pensacola.
The airport was fairly quiet for this time of the morning.
It's clear that despite travel restrictions
easing somewhat lately in the U.S,
there's still quite a way to go
until we get back to normal.
What a lovely little airport this is.
Everybody is so friendly. So nice to see.
Fort Lauderdale airport.
I'm going to head down to the gate,
and grab a coffee hopefully.
It's nice here, I like it.
First coffee of the day finished landside.
Once I was through security,
it was time to head to Starbucks
to get my second of the day.
I love America where people call you sweetie and babe.
Oh, I don't mean anything naughty by it.
They just announced, we have a bit of a delay in boarding
due to a maintenance issue with the plane.
So hopefully, not going to be too long
'cause I've only got like,
a 15 minute connection up in Orlando
to continue my way up to Pensacola.
So fingers crossed, we go on our way pretty soon.
Fortunately, I didn't have to wait too long
and pretty soon we were called for boarding.
It was time to board then
and I headed out to the ramp
to board the pink rocket to PNS.
All right, so onboard the Silver Airways ATR42-600 actually.
It's one of the newer ones. Very nice.
Lovely crew, comfortable flights.
I think it's about 50 minutes
up to Orlando first, I believe.
And then onwards to PNS International Airport.
- Up front, your flight is being flown by
captain Al and co-captain Joshua.
We'll be cruising at the altitude of 22,000 feet.
- First, it took us North to Orlando.
Flight time today was 51 minutes cruising at 16,000 feet.
So then, airborne from Ft. Lauderdale
on the Silver Airways ATR.
Yeah, such a lovely crew on this plane.
Very warm and friendly.
About an hours flight I think up to Orlando first.
And then we connect make my way onwards to Pensacola.
What a view out the window there.
We soon made our descent down into Orlando.
The weather was pretty strange here today
with a misty layer floating just off the ground
which had burnt off completely
by the time we departed again an hour later.
Orlando Airport feels huge
in a small turboprop like the ATR72
and the taxi times from the runway seemed to take forever.
So Orlando, Florida.
Home of course to the Mouse
and our connecting flight up to Pensacola.
And this is the thing I love about American airports.
When you do a connection, they always seem
to come and go from the same part of the airport.
So you literally hop off one,
and hop on straight on another.
In this case, we're going from the same gate
so I just walked straight into the terminal.
Waiting here, and we're going to go straight back out again
onto the same aircraft up to PNS International Airport.
Orlando International felt really strange
with so few passengers there today.
For an airport as leisure oriented as Orlando is,
there seems to be barely any traffic these days
which was pretty sad to see.
Pretty soon though it was time to get back on board
and take leg two of the day up to PNS.
- Hello.
- As much as it's probably an acquired taste,
Silver Airways Livery looks fantastic
with the pink and black,
and of course the huge Flamingo on the tail.
- Hello, good morning.
- For the second flight today,
they ended up reseating a lot of people
for weight and balance.
They're even struggling to fill 80 these days.
Flight two today took us Northwest from Orlando
across the Gulf of Mexico to Pensacola PNS airport.
Flight time on this leg was one hour and 44 minutes,
cruising at 20,000 feet.
So airborne once again on the Silver Airways ATR72-600,
this time heading up to Pensacola from Orlando.
So cool looking out at Orlando out of the window.
Reminds me of lots of holidays we've had there.
I miss holidays, and flying for fun.
A water for this second flight.
It's about an hour and a half.
They give us a drink to get us through it...
About an hour and a half until we land in Pensacola.
All right, starting our descent down into Pensacola.
We should be on the ground in around about
15 minutes from now.
- The weather up in the panhandle today
was pretty miserable this morning.
Low cloud and visibility let in not much
in the way of views during our approach.
My ride from Ft. Lauderdale to PNS this morning
cost me 144 pounds 50, or 199 U.S. dollars.
This works out at a cost of 26 pence per mile.
Despite its name officially being called
Pensacola International Airport,
PNS airport doesn't actually serve
any international destinations.
I guess they're operating on the premise
that if you build it, they will come.
Indeed it's the 10th busiest airport in Florida
with around 3,000 passengers a day
coming through PNS every day in 2019.
If you like this cool bag tag, by the way
you can pick it up in the merch store at noelphilips.com.
I'd like to say a big thanks to my patrons too.
You can join them at the link on the screen now
to get access to my WhatsApp group,
weekly zoom calls, and much more.
Well, here we are then at
PNS international airport in Pensacola, Florida.
And a great little flight that was with Silver Airways.
What a nice airline they are.
Proper Southern hospitality, that was.
Cabin crew were just absolutely lovely.
And the ATR was a cool ride as well
in that beautiful pink color scheme
with the Flamingo on the tail,
I mean how cool is that, really?
Really cloudy day here, actually,
it was a really sort of misty approach
into the ILS into runway one seven here.
I think the cloud base was about 500 feet AGL
and the minimums here is like 300 or something.
It was a little bit dicey.
Potentially we were close to going around it I guess.
But other than that, we were all right.
Let me know what you thought too.
Silver Airways, down in the comments below
on what you thought to the flight from Fort Lauderdale
via Orlando to PNS International Airport,
here at Pensacola, Florida.
In the meantime as always, thanks for watching.
Take care and I'll see you on the next one.
Bye for now.