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Somebody put this airport waaaay too close to the beach

Tue 15 December 2015 17:46, UK

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Boeing 747-400 from Amsterdam

I think these marvelous photographs by prominent Austrian photographer Josef Hoflehner and his son Jakob pretty much speak for themselves. They were taken at Maho Beach on the Caribbean island of St. Martin (it’s a little more than a hundred miles east of Puerto Rico)–the beach is right next to the short runway of the Princess Juliana International Airport. Since it’s on the southern, or Dutch, side of the island, it’s actually called Sint Maarten.

Josef and Jakob visited four times between 2009 and 2011, each time for about three weeks. Josef told Slate:

It’s an extraordinary place. There simply isn’t anything like this airport anywhere on the planet. With all the heightened security we have today, one can not get that close to a plane anywhere else without buying a ticket.
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On average, there were only five or six passengers jets coming in per day, and often there as an hour or more between the landings. It’s not like we were relaxing on the beach like other beachgoers. We had the cameras in our hands, standing on the beach, since you never know when exactly the plane is arriving. When we’d go to the restroom or go get something to drink, then the plane, which was usually late, would suddenly come in.

In 2012 Most Press put out a bound volume of the photographs under the title Jet Airliner: The Complete Works.

Corsair Boeing 747-400 from Paris