The Airline Flying Planeloads of Mormons Across the Country

Breeze Airways and the pilgrimages of the Mormon diaspora

illustration by Beck Seamons

Like many Latter-day Saints who grew up outside of the Intermountain West, I’ve taken my share of flights to Utah for school, graduations, weddings, and family reunions. These regular transcontinental pilgrimages are just a part of life for those of the Mormon diaspora. Especially in April—the month of general conference and BYU graduation.

I joined the spring fray this year, booking a flight from Washington, DC directly to Provo for my younger sister’s BYU graduation, courtesy of Breeze Airways.

Since it began offering nonstop flights between a handful of major US cities and Provo in 2021 (although its DC route launched in 2024), Breeze—a budget airline headquartered in the Salt Lake City suburbs—has changed this rite of return, streamlining the trip “back west” for everyone who was planning to jump in their rental car at the Salt Lake airport and drive the hour south to Provo anyways.

More interesting than convenience, though, is the practical implication of running a direct flight to Provo from DC: you’re just going to be flying planeloads of Mormons across the country. They are the market. Who else would need to go straight to a small city an hour south of the only place in Utah (that’s not a ski resort) most people have ever heard of?

I mean, I know that Silicon Slopes is hot and getting hotter—if Ryan Smith and his other Utah Jazz (or is it Mammoth?) mega-fan, flat-brimmed-hat-wearing friends are to be trusted—but I still think most Adobe execs in town for the quarterly business review are flying to Salt Lake.

Walking up to the gate for a flight headed to Salt Lake, I’m always prepared to play a game of “I Spy.” The strollers come into view first, followed by the BYU football “gameday” t-shirts with their familiar logos (Qualtrics, Mountain America Credit Union, and Zions Bank) on the back. And then suddenly I realize I know half the people at the gate.

Heading to BYU after Christmas break, I’d invariably run into kids from my ward or stake returning too, or see a couple of missionaries traveling to the MTC. But this Breeze flight takes it to a whole new level. It’s not a matter of whether I’m going to meet someone I know at the gate. It’s a matter of how many it will be. I’ve even run into my aunt.

My sister has compared walking down the aisle of a Provo-bound Breeze flight to attending stake conference (minus those random area seventies on the stand). There’s often a familiar face in every row.

And the sheer concentration of diasporic Mormonism—now gathered from across the DC area at gate B72, then shepherded onto one too small plane—makes for a wonderful sort of people-watching. Some highlights from my April trip on Breeze: There was a grandma walking the aisle with her newborn grandchild (flying with your adult children to help them with their kids feels Mormon) and a woman in front of me wearing an “I Am a Child of God” t-shirt. The man sitting next to me read the Old Testament for literally the entire flight, toggling back and forth between Exodus and the week’s Come, Follow Me lesson on his phone’s Gospel Library app. And towards the end of the flight, the woman on the end of my row (married to devoted scripture reader) asked a flight attendant when Breeze would start offering herbal tea as a part of its complimentary beverage service.

We really are a peculiar people, I thought to myself walking off the plane in Provo into the late afternoon light, the Wasatch now majestically towering on my remade horizon. There just isn’t any other way around it. Sometimes I wish we’d be more peculiar than we are (read: less MAGA) and sometimes I wish we’d be less (so that ABC stops making reality TV shows about secret lives).

But mostly I’m just grateful. Grateful to be a part of a community that means something, a community that encourages us to stretch ourselves unselfishly in family life, insistently reminds us of our own—and our neighbors’—intrinsic worth as human beings, asks us to spend meaningful time daily with our sacred texts, and disciplines us with a health code that (ideally) creates a more intentional relationship with what we consume.