If you’re an aviation geek, you’re no doubt familiar with Maho Beach in St. Maarten. What makes it so special is that it’s located immediately below the arrival runway for Princess Juliana International Airport. And when I say immediately below, I mean immediately below. You’ll have planes flying maybe 50 feet over your head while you’re on a picture perfect beach.
For those of you not familiar with Maho Beach, here’s a video of some landings at Maho Beach:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpBmChT4KTs
Perhaps the highlight is when the 3x weekly KLM 747 arrives in the afternoons, as it’s the biggest plane the airport gets. Then again, the Air France A340 from Paris isn’t too bad either. 😉
Many of us (myself included) haven’t been to Maho Beach, though would love to experience it. While I’d like to make it out there eventually, in the meantime there’s some good news — there’s now a live webcam of Maho Beach available at mahobeachcam.com.
So while you might not feel the sand on your toes, the wind from the jet blast in your hair, or the smell of jet fuel in your nose, it’s probably the next best thing.
If you want to just catch the highlights, I recommend also opening up Flightradar24 for the airport, so you can see when planes are inbound and outbound. That way you can just open the webcam when planes are nearby.
Or you can just turn the volume up loud, and when you hear planes approaching, quickly switch browsers to the webcam.
Man, this is going to cost me a lot of productivity!
Anyone else love this Maho Beach webcam as much as I do?
(Tip of the hat to Apurva)
I went to Maho last year. All avgeeks have to go there. It is an amazing experience, the videos can't describe how amazing it feels to have a turboprop land 10 feet over you head, and an a340 20 feet. I recommend going there at least one in your lives.
Great! Now I want to go see this in person! What's the best way to get there from SAN using miles?
@Kevin, STFU.
If you are at the beach to LAUNCH a firework or drone, you'll see the plane, won't you?
Looks really awesome but isn't there a huge security risk in chase for example some mentally ill or perhaps just drunk person decide to launch something(firework) or just fly a drone into the landing path of and landing airplane...
Actually, FlightRadar24 is already queued up on the site as a courtesy by the site, so no need to load it separately.
And yes, manually controlled camera makes the scene so much better. They zoom in on taking off aircraft and then get back to the beach for arrivals!
Love it! Headed there later this year on another one of my Mega Mileage Runs!
Not available in Egypt -- isn't racism old-fashioned nowadays?
Hey Lucky,
Love your blog. I actually live here on St. Maarten. You have to make it down here at least once to believe that you can reach your hand out and touch a landing plane or a few minutes later be blown away by one taking off. The experience is truly exhilarating. Anyway, keep up the good work!
You will actually see the planes land before you hear the sound.
Hey Ben, thanks for the link. I was lucky enough to to visit when I was cruising. I often wonder why you don't review cruise liners? Seems like there is a gap in the market..
I know they give me something awesome and I still want more.... I wish they have multiple cameras with different angles/directions and not a person controlling the view. still I love it fantastic quality also
The inner avgeek in me is freaking out!
Interesting that they occasionally have someone actively tracking the camera instead of just a fixed position.
Amazing, no more work for me!!
No. Watchin it on YouTube was enough.