Close Lake Farm sat on land flat enough and broad enough to land a twin-engined biplane, and that geography alone made it interesting to the new commercial aviators of the early thirties. The first recognised commercial passenger arrived on 21 January 1933, in a DH.83 Fox Moth bound for the Glen Auldyn Estate. By the summer of 1934, eight aircraft had landed in a single day because fog had closed Ronaldsway on the south coast. That weather advantage was enough to win Derwent Hall Caine an operating licence from Lieutenant Governor Sir Claude Hill in August 1934, and a permanent licence from the Air Ministry the following month. Four hundred tons of silt dredged from the Sulby River was used to firm up the surface. A Nissen hangar, a petrol pump, and a telephone followed.

United Airways announced a skeleton service in April 1935 and a full schedule for May, with a route from London via Blackpool to Hall Caine and onwards to Dublin's Collinstown. To run the operation, the airline brought in Captain Oscar Garden, an aviator who had made what the press called a sensational flight from England to Australia in 1930. The Argosy biplane City of Manchester was converted to carry 28 passengers and called at Hall Caine when traffic required. By the autumn, services ran London-Blackpool-Hall Caine-Belfast. Through a round of amalgamations, United Airways was folded into the new British Airways Ltd, the company that would itself join Imperial Airways in 1940 to form BOAC. For a moment, this small Manx field sat on a national air map.

The summer of 1936 was Hall Caine's busiest. In a single Saturday, 18 July, the field handled 160 arrivals, including the music hall double-act The Western Brothers, who had flown in from Birmingham's Elmdon Airport to perform at Douglas's Villa Marina. George Formby touched down in August on a private charter with friends. Records tumbled: a Dragon Rapide carrying mail covered the trip from Hall Caine to Ronaldsway in six minutes with a tailwind. By the end of August, the airfield had handled around 2,500 passengers, many of them refugees from fog that had grounded operations at Ronaldsway. In the seven months to November 1936, 7,000 passengers had been landed. Hall Caine had accommodated 39 diversions from its southern rival on 18 separate days.

By 1937 the lease passed to Northern and Scottish Airways, and the cracks began to show. In May the airline suspended most services and never restored them all. The Ramsey Ratepayers Association petitioned the Lieutenant Governor to save the airport, but the final commercial flight departed at 4:15 pm on Saturday, 2 October 1937. The summer of 1938 brought one last extraordinary visitor: the Austrian glider pilot Robert Kronfeld, blown off course while attempting the first glider crossing of the Irish Sea. Towed behind an Avro Cadet from Kirby Moorside in Yorkshire, his Kirby Kite sailplane crossed from St Bees Head to Maughold Head and landed at Hall Caine just after eight in the evening. After that the field grew quiet. The Air Ministry inspected the site for a permanent RAF station but rejected it, choosing land at Jurby instead. The Ramsey Gun Club took over the airfield for skeet shooting.