He became the manager of the Provincetown Airport, and started giving local residents rides to Boston in his airplane.

Soon, Van Arsdale learned that people liked the idea of taking a 20-minute flight across the bay, and started the airline.

PBA acquired the Lockheed Model 10 Electra and used it on the Provincetown route, and then expanded service to include Cape Cod Airfield in Marstons Mills (later moved to Hyannis).

In the following years, the route network in Florida and New England was expanded, and in 1968 a Douglas DC-3 was bought at $50,000 and refurbished at a cost of $150,000 to fill the demand.

In the winter months, the fleet would be swapped, with the DC-3s and Martin 404s migrating to Florida, and the Cessnas flying in the north.

Soon thereafter, an interline agreement was signed with Delta Air Lines, and in 1982 PBA became a regional feeder for Eastern Airlines.

[3] By the mid-1980s, in addition to Provincetown, Boston, and Hyannis, PBA's northern routes reached Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, New Bedford, MA and Burlington, VT.

The Florida routes virtually covered the entire state from Jacksonville to Tampa, Naples, Miami, and Key West, as well as smaller cities in between.

The expansion and integration of all the new routes, aircraft and personnel brought about technical, safety and administrative shortcomings, which culminated in a crash on September 7, 1984.

On December 6, 1984, 13 people were killed in the crash of an Embraer Bandeirante shortly after takeoff from Jacksonville FL.

Peter Van Arsdale turned to Hugh Culverhouse of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team for financial help for his ailing airline, in exchange for part ownership.

The airline continued to lose money, Culverhouse gave up his investment, turning control back to Van Arsdale, and PBA filed for bankruptcy.

People Express provided financing to keep PBA operating, and changed PBAs routes to feed into its own.

People Express had also purchased Frontier Airlines of Denver and Britt Airways of Terre Haute, Indiana.

Additional service was added as Continental Express with PBA's EMB-110s from Newark to Binghamton, NY, New Haven, CT and Baltimore, MD.

PBA flight crews started operating the new Bar Harbor Airlines ATR-42 turboprops from Hyannis to LaGuardia Airport and Newark.

PBA's Cessna 402 airplanes started appearing on some Bar Harbor Airlines routes, such as Hartford/Bradley to New York/La Guardia.

As Eastern came back to life, the parent company decided to operate the PBA/Bar Harbor routes under what may have been one of the first dual codeshare agreements in the airline industry.

Cape Air also operated two of the former PBA ATR-42 turboprops as United Express (formerly Continental Connection) carrier in Guam until the type was retired in 2018.