Western Airlines began serving Imperial County Airport in 1943 with Douglas DC-3 flights to Los Angeles via stops in San Diego and Long Beach, and was also flying nonstop to Yuma.

[7] According to its March 1, 1953 system timetable, Bonanza listed its flights to the airport as service to El Centro and was operating Douglas DC-3 prop aircraft with a daily westbound routing of Phoenix-Blythe-Yuma-El Centro-San Diego-Santa Ana-Los Angeles.

[8] Bonanza was also operating a daily eastbound DC-3 service at this time with routing of Los Angeles-Santa Ana-San Diego-El Centro-Yuma-Blythe-Phoenix-Prescott-Kingman-Las Vegas.

[12] At this same time, one of the DC-9 jet flights to LAX operated continuing, no change of plane service to Fresno, San Francisco, Portland, OR and Seattle via intermediate stops at other Air West destinations.

All Hughes Airwest service to El Centro ended in 1979 and was replaced by commuter carriers Cochise and Sun Aire Lines.

[13][14] The following is a list of commuter and regional airlines as well as their respective aircraft types that served Imperial County Airport (IPL) from 1969 through 1999 primarily with nonstop flights to Los Angeles (LAX) and one stop to Phoenix (PHX) by way of Yuma (YUM).

[1] For the 12 month period ending December 31, 2019, the airport had 14,368 aircraft operations, an average of 39 per day: 66% general aviation, 8% scheduled commercial / air taxi and 26% military.