Jet landing:Soooo Low-Almost hits cars on road

I cant believe how close this passenger plane comes to the highway and the people on it while its landing.
It appears to literally come within feet of hitting the cars on the road and by the looks of it this is where and how the planes always land at this particular airports runway.

Low flying plane

WOW that is low maybe because of the weather,
Where is the airport?

If I'm not mistaken, there is a thread
on this already.

One poster commented on people
throwing dogs into the water, for
some odd reason.

Ok, been using Search, but can't
find it.

I KNOW it's here...

Any help ?

Lex

I believe planes always land that low in St. Maarten. Just take a look at Airliners.net of photos from this area. There are hundreds, many showing low, incoming planes.

jra,
I thank you.

Regards,
Lex

JRA is right. The end of the runway is within about 50 feet of the other side of the road. If you look at the road you can see the fence that keeps people off the runway. There are a lot of absolutely amazing pictures of planes landing at this runway. People on the beach don't even seem to notice them after the first few come down.

Princess Juliana runway in St. Maarten is only 7054 feet long. There is only a few feet over run on either end and only water after that. It is a very demanding airport to operate out of, particularly for a Boeing 747.

So the reason those airplanes look low on approach (other than the fact they ARE low on approach) is that when landing on a short runway you don't have time to mess around. You want to be on speed and not +10 knots for gramma and gramps and you want to get it on the runway within the first 1000 feet and preferably a lot sooner. No time for a flare and smooth landing, just plant it, spoilers, brakes and reverse thrust.

For takeoff, since you cannot take all that much fuel because of the runway length and ambient temperature so I believe they use San Juan or Miami to take on fuel.

Here is a googlearth of Princess Juliana. You can see the water at both ends:

absolutely normal for St. Maarten. St. Barths has a similar situation, only the planes are much smaller. My last trip there I had the pleasure of riding shotgun on the flight from St. Barths to St. Maarten. We took off over the beach, flying over the heads of sunbathers and we landed at St. Maarten, coming in off the water. I don't remember there being a road there but I do have some pics on the pc of the landing. I'll look for em and post a cockpit shot.

[edit on 11-8-2007 by Crakeur]

Im glad that someone was able to give the loation of the runway because I wasnt sure exactly where it was.
That must be a hell of a stressful landing for the pilots, not much room for error there.

said cockpit shot. this is what you see on the approach.

files.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by Lexion
If I'm not mistaken, there is a thread
on this already.

One poster commented on people
throwing dogs into the water, for
some odd reason.

Ok, been using Search, but can't
find it.

I KNOW it's here...

Any help ?

Lex

Yheh mate - I'm pretty sure that was my post under rare aircraft pics here cant remember the site I was looking at.

That rare pics thread was well cool - got to bump that baby back into use!



P.s the dog thing is the locals at the end of the runway when a plane is winding up the engines grab their dogs - when the plane puts the throttle forward they lob the unfortunate muts into the air so the catch the exhaust and end up in the sea

Someone has to pull up a youtube on that - I will pay (points)

[edit on 11/8/2007 by Now_Then]