Extreme Airport + Video

There is a place in St. Martin, Dutch West Indies where you can stand on a picture perfect Caribbean beach and get jet blasted into the water. Not your standard postcard moment.

You would never be able to get this close to a huge passenger airliner anywhere else in the world. In this day and age, it’s hard to believe they still allow it. But they do and it makes for some really interesting photographs if you can avoid having a heart attack.

More shots and a video below
Check out the video of the shoot.
You may want to adjust your volume before starting the video.

St. Martin is a small hilly eastern Caribbean island. The runway of the international airport is just long enough for a 747 but it’s squeezed between a narrow white sand beach on one end and a huge inland lagoon at the other. You stand on the beach only 100 feet from the runway and watch these massive planes make their approach.

The bigger the plane the earlier they need to touch down on the runway in order to stop before the lagoon. It’s terrifying to watch. They start out as a speck above the horizon, then as they draw closer you can see the plane yawing sideways as the pilot makes his final corrections and then suddenly its screaming right on top of you. Unbelievable. The planes are no more forty feet above you (sometimes less) and they’re going 160 mph (sometimes more.) It feels wrong to be standing there.

I googled the arriving flight schedules and not only found out when but what kind of plane was coming in. There was a two-hour window where five or six big planes were coming in. 757’s, A380’s, 737’s and a 747. This was a good opportunity to try different lenses, and figure out the best shot. You don’t have much time to get the shot so the more chances the better.

Gear: Nikon D2X / Nikon 10.5mm fisheye lens / Hot Model / Ray Ban Mirrored Aviators / Faux Leather Aviator jacket / Boeing 737 / Standby Defibrillator

Exposure: ISO 100 F8 1/750th


As always, click any image for the large version TR.