A tight landing at Princess Juliana International Airport

February 5, 2016 • 3:30 pm

This airport, right past the beach on the island of St. Maarten, is notorious for having little leeway for landing. Locals and tourists gather on Maho beach to watch the fun. The plane is a PAWA Dominicana flight, and an McDonnell Douglas 83 plane; the landing was on January 6 of this year.

Not all the landings are that close, but people have been hurt by jetblasts from airplanes taking off:

45 thoughts on “A tight landing at Princess Juliana International Airport”

    1. Am reminded of tourists in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park approaching close to bear cubs and Mama to take photos.

  2. It’s kind of surprising they let people be located right on the end of the active runway like that?? I guess, if you let them, people will be very stupid. The airport management probably thinks it is good for tourism.

    I can tell you the air force would never allow it.

    1. There is a bar / restaurant on the beach just to one side of the runway. People actually wait for the planes to approach and then intentionally place themselves to experience the jet blast.

      I have to admit, I would definitely do that if I visited the place. I’d definitely wear goggles though!

      1. I’d be waiting in the bar, thanks. Been around enough noisy jets but don’t let me stop you.

    2. It’s a public road and a public beach.

      They can’t stop it unless they put traffic lights and barriers on the road for every time a plane takes off / lands. There are roads lie that across the ends of runways all over the world, though maybe not quite as close.

      And furthermore, no plane is going to actually hit them unless it’s having an accident, in which case a few beachgoers would be the least of their worries.

      cr

      1. Yeah sure, what’s a few tourists on the beach. A spot on the sand is worth so much a square foot.

        I think in the states you would not see it. Not that close. They sure wouldn’t let people stand around at the end of an active runway taking pictures. Maybe we have some additional safety laws because people are really that stupid.

  3. I wonder how many of these planes are landed by the on board computer. This would give me more confidence. Many newer planes are, but there have got to be many that have not been retrofitted.
    The main danger would be, I suppose, the risk of a downdraft – a microburst that would push the plane onto the highway.

    1. Remember that foreign commercial airliner that crashed while landing at the San Francisco airport about a year ago. Some far east carrier. Anyway it was coming in on ALS and the tail of the plane hit the rocks just before the runway and crashed the plane. I think two people were killed. There were three pilots in the cockpit that just sat there watching it happen.

      2. There’s a serious problem when a plane is flying under the command of more than one pilot.
        That may be the same case I recall where one of three pilots was a trainee landing the plane. When there was a deviation from the flight path, the other two very experienced pilots thought the other would handle the emergency. So they both waited…and waited…

        1. Read the BBA (France) report on AF447 and feel for the unfortunate passengers and cabin crew killed by the incompetent idiots supposedly flying the A330.

  4. I would be worried about being hit by FOD. I guess at my size, I wouldn’t be concerned about being tossed backwards like a ragdoll to smash my head on a concrete curb. Poor girl is going to have CTE from that blow.

  5. They have a board with arrival and departure times for planes, with large ones specially marked. It’s clearly a tourist draw.

    There are plenty of signs telling people to not stand directly behind the planes, which are duly ignored, often resulting in injuries.

    Takeoffs are more interesting. The plane sits there for a couple minutes, brakes locked, throttle at full, to spool the engines up as high as they’ll go, before finally starting to roll. And they do this because not far past the runway is a mountain that they need to avoid.

    I’d have liked to see a 747 take off, but the biggest plane to take off when I was there was something like a 737 or A320.

    2. “There are plenty of signs telling people to not stand directly behind the planes, which are duly ignored, often resulting in injuries.”

      I’m reminded that “My teacher [parents, etc.] should have made me . . . .” rolls off the tongue of not a few adults.

      1. The signs are there to cover the arse of authority. It just means they can’t be sued if someone ignores the sign then gets hurt by jet blast.

        cr

  6. I have a stood on that beach/roadway watching the planes come overhead. You can feel the air rush from the planes. It is thrilling and scary at the same time. I had to fight the urge to duck.

    1. One of those things like standing under low railway bridges or waterfalls; yeah, I’d probably do it.

  7. Fun fact: The Dutch part of the island of Sint Maarten is an independent country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in much the same way that Scotland has a high degree of independency within the United Kingdom.

    1. The Dutch side and the French side are so different. Driving up and over the ‘mountain’ feels like going to a different world. I like both sides.

        1. French cuisine vs burger restaurants. French side has old fashion jewelry stores. Nude beaches vs regular. Quaint stores and villages vs bigger stores. Basically old world vs new.

  8. Lets play spot the fake airplane… one of the landings in the second video was done using a Software Flight Simulator.

  11. The planes touchdown literally two seconds after passing over the spectators. To anyone who thinks this isn’t dangerous: Asiana 214.

    1. Of course a bus has far greater area exposed to the blast, and the worst that can happen if you’re standing on the beach is, you get blown into the sea…

      cr

      1. The important thing is surface area relative to weight. Watch what happens to people in the video Jerry linked to in his post (“…people have been hurt by jet blasts”).

        1. Oh yes, because she hit the wall. Not so much the blast as the impact with the wall.

          Probably safer to stand on the beach.

          I presume the reason for the low wall is to stop all the sand being blown off the beach.

          cr

  14. Here’s the lowest St Maarten landing:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx1NvSz_Cls
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ1W7EBjApY
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALnuK_r5VhY

    (I linked all three videos of it because of the number of commenters on Youboob who said dumb things like “It’s fake, the crowd would have got blown into the sea” or “It’s fake, they’d all be running for their lives” or “Nobody lands that low” or “Planes don’t fly that slow!” (it was in slow motion, dummy!) – obviously not having seen any other St Maarten videos. My view is that any of those videos would be extremely hard to fake, with the crowd in the foreground overlapping the plane)

    cr

  16. Didn’t see any Lufthansa in the first couple min of the second one, but if they do go there I suspect their absence is because they go straight down. At least every time I’ve flown them their landings seem that way. (And their Baltic Herring is great!)

  17. They need at least another 1000 ft. added to the runway length. Understand it is only 7200 ft. I am surprised the big heavies even go there.

    O’Hara has 8 runways from 2286 meters to 3962 meters. 7500 ft. to 12,998 ft.

  19. Back in the 1980s, the Air Force ran a series of training bombing runs with B-52 bombers over our part of N.E. Missouri (it was supposed to have resembled some area in Eastern Europe)- for months, we saw B-52s, usually in groups of three, fly directly over us at 300 feet altitude, which is not that much more than their wingspan. These videos don’t convey how loud these jets are: you could hear them coming miles away, and the ground almost shook (the livestock weren’t too happy about it, but they got used to it).

    1. Those would have been pure turbojets, not modern turbofans which have been engineered for noise suppression.

      cr

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