You will soon be able to get to Santa Barbara County by air thanks to a new service provided by Mokulele Airlines. Tickets for the daily flights between LAX and Santa Maria Public Airport will cost $65 when they launch on October 6, which is great news for Santa Barbara or San Luis Obispo residents—or anybody who just can’t take the time out of their weekend getaway to drive all the way up there.
The diminutive Santa Maria Airport currently offers only two main routes, a United Airlines route to San Francisco and an Allegiant Air route to Las Vegas (it also occasionally has flights to Hawaii). Last month, United announced they would be abandoning service to the Santa Barbara County airport, as KEYT reports.
That was a blow to the airport and, in particular, the residents up there who used the SFO connector for their travel plans. Without it, passengers generally have to drive to a Los Angeles or San Francisco area airport to connect to outbound flights.
In stepped the Hawaii-based Mokulelele and their tiny Cessna Grand Caravan plane to help ferry passengers between L.A. and Santa Maria—nine at a time.
Mokulele is mostly known for providing “island hopper” flights within Hawaii. Earlier in 2016 they launched their first mainland flights, with new routes going into Imperial County, California and LAX. They are a fully independent, family-owned airline, which is pretty rare at this point, and they don’t have a lot of deals in place with other carriers, so using their jets as a ‘last-mile’ service into or out of the Central Coast may be something travelers will have to book separately from the rest of their trips for the time being.
A flight from LAX to Santa Maria will take about 47 minutes, compared to a drive time of almost three hours—so it might be time to start thinking how you’ll spend those precious extra two hours and 13 minutes, though given how much time it takes to get to LAX these days in time to make boarding, maybe driving is the way to go?
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