Maho Beach is a strip of Caribbean sand on Sint Maarten that sits directly under the approach to Princess Juliana airport, and arriving jets cross it about thirty metres up. That is not a stunt; it is arithmetic. The island's hills left almost no flat ground, so in 1942 the runway was laid on a thin sandbar between the ocean and Simpson Bay Lagoon. When it was lengthened, the extra length came out of the lagoon. The sea end never moved, and it has nowhere to move to, so every approach comes in low over the water and over your head. As a scheduled arrival nears, the beach fills along the fence, phones and long lenses pointed out over the bay. The aircraft grows from a speck into a wall of noise, and a cheer goes up as the wheels clear the wire.
The departures are watched from the far end of the sand. A jet running up at the threshold pushes its wash across the beach hard enough to sting, and at full power hard enough to knock people down. The blunt signs on the fence date from 2017, when the blast killed a woman holding it. Each morning the Sunset Bar chalks the day's arrivals and departures on a hand-painted board, the unofficial timetable you plan your afternoon around. For years the picture that travelled was a KLM Boeing 747 coming down over the sand, the biggest airliner ever scheduled on this route. It stopped in 2016; the wide-bodies from Paris and Amsterdam are the big moments now. The last arrivals of the day are the ones to stay for: the sun drops behind the runway and rims each jet as it crosses, clean against darkening water. Between flights it is an ordinary beach with warm, shallow water. The moment most people came for lasts seconds: you hear the engines long before you see anything, and then the shadow crosses the water you are standing in.