Miami’s Real Private Jet Hub Is Opa-locka: KOPF Handles 7.5x the Empty Legs of MIA
Updated October 2, 2026: the corridor table and the monthly series now count each unique leg once, like the rest of this story, which moves the March to July swing from 4.0x to 4.6x and makes Opa-locka to Naples the busiest directional pair. The methodology now states this story’s own window, which differs from the later window of our states ranking. An October 1, 2026 update had removed duplicate listing copies from the statewide and per-airport figures.
Florida is the empty leg capital of the United States, but its private jet map looks nothing like its airline map. Over the last twelve months, 91,806 unique empty legs on SkyAccess touched a Florida airport, and the busiest field in the state is not Miami International. It is Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport, an executive field most travelers have never typed into a search box, and it handles 7.5 times the empty leg activity of MIA.
The key numbers
- 91,806 unique empty legs touched a Florida airport in the trailing twelve months (departures August 27, 2025 through August 26, 2026)
- 7.5x: Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport (KOPF) recorded 18,269 empty leg touches versus 2,438 at Miami International (KMIA)
- Naples is #2: Naples Municipal Airport (KAPF) out-touches every airport in Fort Lauderdale
- 28.1 percent of Florida-touching empty legs stay entirely inside the state (25,816 intra-Florida listings)
- 4.6x seasonality: March 2026 peaked at 12,752 Florida-touching empty legs versus 2,787 in July 2026
Miami’s private jet capital is not MIA
Ask most people to name Miami’s aviation hub and they will say Miami International. On the empty leg board, MIA barely registers. Miami International recorded 2,438 empty leg touches in the window, which puts it twelfth in the state, behind Orlando Executive and Jacksonville. Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport, across town, recorded 18,269, which is 7.5 times MIA’s total and about 70 percent more than the number two airport in the state.
This is not a Miami quirk. It is how private aviation works everywhere, and Florida shows it in its purest form: business aviation concentrates at dedicated executive fields, where there are no airline banks to queue behind, FBOs are built for private traffic, and slot pressure is low. The commercial giant of South Florida is a footnote in this market. The business aviation field is the market.
Florida’s twelve busiest empty leg airports
An accounting note before the table. The statewide figure of 91,806 counts unique empty legs. The per-airport figures below count touches at that airport: a flight counts once at every airport it touches, so a leg from Naples to Opa-locka appears in both the KAPF row and the KOPF row. That means the airport rows sum to more than the unique statewide figure, by design. The two units answer different questions and should not be added together.
| Rank | Airport | Code | Metro | Empty leg touches |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport | KOPF | Miami | 18,269 |
| 2 | Naples Municipal Airport | KAPF | Naples | 10,708 |
| 3 | President Donald J. Trump International Airport | KDJT | West Palm Beach | 9,999 |
| 4 | Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport | KFXE | Fort Lauderdale | 8,354 |
| 5 | Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport | KFLL | Fort Lauderdale | 6,086 |
| 6 | Boca Raton Airport | KBCT | Boca Raton | 5,794 |
| 7 | Witham Field | KSUA | Stuart | 5,790 |
| 8 | Sarasota Bradenton International Airport | KSRQ | Sarasota/Bradenton | 5,327 |
| 9 | Tampa International Airport | KTPA | Tampa | 4,852 |
| 10 | Jacksonville International Airport | KJAX | Jacksonville | 3,292 |
| 11 | Orlando Executive Airport | KORL | Orlando | 3,279 |
| 12 | Miami International Airport | KMIA | Miami | 2,438 |
The number three airport deserves its own mention: President Donald J. Trump International Airport in West Palm Beach logged 9,999 touches, and we have a full traffic profile of KDJT from earlier in this series.
The surprise runner-up: Naples
The second finding is quieter but just as counterintuitive. Naples Municipal Airport, a single municipal field serving a Gulf Coast town, recorded 10,708 empty leg touches. That beats Fort Lauderdale Executive (8,354), Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International (6,086), and everything else in Broward County. Naples is not a stopover market. It is a destination market with the wealth density to generate its own gravity, and the corridor data below shows exactly where that gravity pulls.
The Naples-Opa-locka shuttle
Of the 91,806 Florida-touching empty legs, 25,816, or 28.1 percent, never left the state. And within that intra-Florida traffic, one corridor dominates: Opa-locka and Naples. KOPF to KAPF is the single busiest directional pair at 401 unique empty legs, and the reverse direction, KAPF to KOPF, is second at 389. Combined, the two directions add up to 790 unique empty legs, a cross-state shuttle between Gulf Coast wealth and Miami’s executive hub that runs in both directions nearly evenly.
| Rank | From | To | Unique empty legs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | KOPF (Miami) | KAPF (Naples) | 401 |
| 2 | KAPF (Naples) | KOPF (Miami) | 389 |
| 3 | KDJT (West Palm Beach) | KAPF (Naples) | 295 |
| 4 | KAPF (Naples) | KDJT (West Palm Beach) | 229 |
| 5 | KOPF (Miami) | KSUA (Stuart) | 220 |
| 6 | KOPF (Miami) | KTPA (Tampa) | 219 |
| 7 | KSUA (Stuart) | KOPF (Miami) | 215 |
| 8 | KOPF (Miami) | KSRQ (Sarasota/Bradenton) | 211 |
| 9 | KTPA (Tampa) | KOPF (Miami) | 210 |
| 10 | KSRQ (Sarasota/Bradenton) | KOPF (Miami) | 206 |
Notice the pattern in the table: every one of the ten busiest intra-Florida pairs has Opa-locka or Naples on at least one end. The state’s internal private jet network is a hub-and-spoke system, and the hubs are a business aviation field and a municipal airport.
The snowbird arc: March runs 4.6x July
Florida’s empty leg supply follows the snowbird calendar with almost textbook regularity. Marketplace listings touching Florida climb through the fall, hold a high plateau through the winter, peak in March, and collapse through the summer. March 2026 recorded 12,752 Florida-touching empty legs against 2,787 in July 2026, roughly a 4.6x swing from peak to trough.
| Month | Florida-touching unique empty legs |
|---|---|
| Sep 2025 | 4,007 |
| Oct 2025 | 6,234 |
| Nov 2025 | 7,594 |
| Dec 2025 | 9,864 |
| Jan 2026 | 9,170 |
| Feb 2026 | 9,958 |
| Mar 2026 | 12,752 |
| Apr 2026 | 11,898 |
| May 2026 | 9,267 |
| Jun 2026 | 5,610 |
| Jul 2026 | 2,787 |
Two caveats. First, the edge months August 2025 and August 2026 are excluded: each sits partly outside the analysis window, and because the median empty leg is listed only days before departure, edge months are censored on top of being partial. Second, this arc describes empty leg listings on the SkyAccess marketplace, not total Florida air traffic. It is a supply curve for one market, not a census of the sky.
Six of the twelve are pure business aviation fields
Half of Florida’s top twelve are dedicated business aviation airports with no scheduled airline service at all: Miami-Opa Locka Executive, Naples Municipal, Fort Lauderdale Executive, Boca Raton, Witham Field in Stuart, and Orlando Executive. Travelers planning the city pair can explore a private jet from Miami to Orlando. This mirrors what we found when we ranked all fifty states by private jet empty leg activity: the market runs through business aviation and executive fields, not commercial hubs. Florida just demonstrates it at the top of the table, with the state’s number one and number two airports both invisible to anyone shopping airline routes.
What this means if you are booking
The practical lesson is simple: search the business aviation field, not the airline hub. A traveler filtering for Miami empty legs by MIA sees a twelfth-place airport; the real inventory is on the KOPF empty legs page. The same goes for Naples (KAPF) and West Palm Beach (KDJT), the state’s two and three.
Second lesson: alerts beat searching. Our published lead-time analysis of 414,722 unique empty legs found the median empty leg appears just 3 days before takeoff. Inventory that exists today mostly did not exist last week, so a saved alert on a route or airport will catch flights a manual search never sees. You can browse the current board of Florida empty leg flights or the full national inventory of live empty leg flights to start.
Methodology
All figures come from SkyAccess marketplace listings. The dataset covers departures from August 27, 2025 through August 26, 2026. It was first pulled on September 2, 2026, and every count was re-measured from the production database between September 29 and October 2, 2026 so that each unique leg counts once: a leg is identified by its departure airport, arrival airport, departure time, aircraft tail number and aircraft model, and deleted, withdrawn or cancelled listings and internal-only flights are excluded. Listings deleted after a pull drop out of later pulls, so totals can differ marginally between pull dates. The counts are listed empty legs, not confirmed flown flights. This window is this story’s own and is not the window of our published states ranking (see below).
Units. Two units appear in this story and they are not interchangeable. Statewide and monthly figures count unique empty legs: 91,806 unique empty legs touched at least one Florida airport in the window, and 25,816 of those (28.1 percent) had both endpoints in Florida. Per-airport figures count touches: a listing counts once at every airport it touches, so an intra-Florida leg appears at two airports and the airport rows sum to more than the unique statewide total.
Reconciliation with the states ranking. Our US states ranking was pulled on September 29, 2026 for a later window, the 12 months to September 28, 2026, so its Florida figures differ from this story’s: it reports Florida at 115,265 endpoint touches and 89,800 unique empty legs, and Miami-Opa Locka Executive at 17,674 legs. Measured the way that ranking measures states, where an intra-Florida flight contributes two touches, one per endpoint, Florida had 117,622 endpoint touches in this story’s window, against 91,806 unique empty legs. Figures from the two windows should not be combined or compared directly.
Seasonality. The monthly series excludes the window-censored edge months of August 2025 and August 2026, which have partial coverage compounded by the 3-day median listing lead time. Months are calendar months of departure (UTC). The series describes marketplace listing volume, not total air traffic.
No comparisons with earlier years. Marketplace coverage grew over the period, so we make no comparisons with earlier years; the numbers describe this window only.
SkyAccess is a live private jet and empty leg marketplace at skyaccess.com, listing 5,000+ live empty leg flights from a network of 900+ certified charter operators. This story is part of SkyAccess Data & Research.
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