Watch your head! There’s a plane landing!

You’ve gotta love Princess Juliana Airport. Located in St Maarten, Netherlands Antilles. They’ve got a small runway .. in fact, it’s really small here it is on Google maps. It’s infamous short landing strip and beaches at either end mean that local sun-bathers can get blown off the beach by jet engines and planes approach very low. The airport website seems to be aware of the problems and says..

“The existing terminal building with a capacity of 1.2 million passengers has already reached its saturation point and cannot accommodate any further upgrading or expansion.”

“The current situation at PJIA is in conflict with regulations of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the Department of Civil Aviation of the Netherlands Antilles (DCANA); to terminate this conflict PJIA must introduce a runway end safety area of 150 meters at both ends of its runway, including a 60 meter strip.”

But it’s perhaps this site along with the videos below that show the problem best. You can see the road that runs around the runway, plus the beach and the people getting blown off the beach when a 747 takes off. :)

Stunning..

If you can’t see any of these videos, click here, here and here.