Maho Beach is a strip of sand on the Dutch side of the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten, at Simpson Bay, that lies directly under the approach to Princess Juliana airport, so that arriving airliners cross the beach about thirty metres overhead with their wheels down before touching the runway a few metres past the fence, and it has become the most famous plane-spotting spot in the world. The runway is short and boxed in by the sea and the lagoon, lengthened once by reclaiming land, which is why the jets come in so low over the water and the sand; as each scheduled arrival nears, sunbathers and day-trippers gather shoulder to shoulder along the beach with phones and long lenses raised toward the glide path, the aircraft grows from a dot over the bay into a wall of noise and shadow, and a cheer goes up the moment the wheels clear the fence. For years the defining image was a KLM Boeing 747 dropping over the sand, the largest airliner ever to fly the route in scheduled service, and since it stopped the wide-bodies from Paris and Amsterdam are the big moments of the day.
The departures are the other show. When a jet powers up at the runway threshold, its engine wash sweeps sand across the beach hard enough to sting and, at full thrust, to knock people flat and blow them into the water, and the signs on the fence warn of it, since people have been hurt and one killed holding the fence. The Sunset Bar at the beach end chalks the day's arrivals and departures on a hand-painted board each morning, the unofficial timetable for choosing a spot, and the surfboard on its wall lists the aircraft to expect. Between flights the water is warm and shallow, and the moment most people come for is floating in it as a wide-body crosses the beach and its shadow sweeps over. Maho is a beach where the planes are the view, and the fence is the front row.