Show Off? Beechcraft King Air Flies Really Low On Approach Into Sint Maarten

When you think about Sint Maarten, Princess Juliana International Airport and/or Maho Beach, low approaches usually come to mind.

More than six years ago, I covered a story about a WestJet 737 that ended up in a dangerous situation just over Maho Beach due to a combination of bad weather and “inadequate flight path monitoring”. Since then there have been quite a few approaches in Sint Maarten that really make you say, “wow that was really low”.

With airport live streams becoming quite popular on YouTube and Twitch, viewers can watch aviation action from their homes, even when things don’t go as planned. Just recently, we were all able to see a tire fall of a United Boeing 777 in San Francisco, and an Air New Zealand ATR 72-600 engine catching fire on approach into Wellington.

Yet another airport live stream has caught an interesting event, this time in Sint Maartern. A camera placed outside the Tortuga Bar on Maho Beach captured a pilot flying their Beechcraft King Air extremely low on the approach path into Princess Juliana.

From the camera’s perspective, it’s hard to tell how low they really were, but it’s clear the pilot gave beachgoers and plane spotters a show. After crossing the shoreline, the pilot pulled up just a bit to clear the fences and displaced runway threshold.

Showing off? 🫣 Pull up! Pull up! Low landing at Maho Beach.

Juliana is known for its low approaches and departures, but is this another one of those cases where the pilot skirts the boundary of safety? Was there enough of a safety margin should something catastrophic happen to the aircraft? What do you think?

I can’t help but remember when a demonstration Embraer E190 almost kissed the fence back in January 2015. Now that was close.

The Famous Embraer Landing St Maarten Remade

Featured image: SHOWME Caribbean/YouTube

Share
Read More