International airport

An international airport is an airport that offers customs and immigration facilities for passengers travelling between countries. International airports are typically larger than domestic airports and often feature longer runways and facilities to accommodate the heavier aircraft commonly used for international and intercontinental travel. International airports often also host domestic flights. Some, such as Frankfurt Airport in Germany are very large; others such as Fa'a'ā International Airport in Tahiti, are quite small.

Buildings, operations and management have become increasingly sophisticated since the mid 20th century, when international airports began to provide infrastructure for international civilian flights. Detailed technical standards have been developed to ensure safety and common coding systems implemented to provide global consistency. The physical structures that serve millions of individual passengers and flights are among the most complex and interconnected in the world. By the second decade of the 21st century, there were over 1,200 international airports and almost two billion international passengers along with 50 million metric tonnes of cargo were passing through them annually.

Princess Juliana International Airport

Princess Juliana International Airport (IATA: SXM, ICAO: TNCM) (also known as Saint Maarten International Airport) is the main airport on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, located on the Dutch side of the island in the country of Sint Maarten. In 2007, the airport handled 1,647,824 passengers and 103,650 aircraft movements. The airport serves as a hub for Windward Islands Airways and is the major gateway for the smaller Leeward Islands, including Anguilla, Saba, St. Barthélemy and St. Eustatius. It is named after Juliana of the Netherlands, who as crown princess landed here in 1944, the year after the airport opened. There is also an airport on the French side of the island, called Aéroport de Grand Case or L'Espérance Airport.

The airport is perhaps best known for very low-altitude flyover landing approaches due to one end of its runway being extremely close to the shore and Maho Beach.

History

The airport was started as a military airstrip in 1942. It was converted to a civilian airport in 1943. In 1964 the airport was remodeled and relocated, with a new terminal building and control tower. The facilities were upgraded in 1985 and 2001.

Juliana of the Netherlands

Juliana (Dutch pronunciation: [ˌjyliˈjaːnaː]; Juliana Louise Emma Marie Wilhelmina; 30 April 1909 – 20 March 2004) was Queen of the Netherlands from 1948 until 1980. She reigned for nearly 32 years. Her reign saw the decolonization of both Indonesia (Dutch East Indies) and Suriname from the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Upon her death at the age of 94, she was the longest-lived former reigning monarch in the world.

Early life and education

Juliana was born in The Hague on 30 April 1909, the only daughter of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and Prince Henry, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. She was the first Dutch royal baby since Wilhelmina herself was born in 1880. Wilhelmina had suffered four miscarriages and one stillbirth, raising the prospect that the House of Orange-Nassau would die with her. In all likelihood, this would have meant that the Dutch throne would have passed to Prince Heinrich XXXII Reuss of Köstritz, who had very close ties to Germany. Juliana's birth thus assured the royal family's survival. Her mother suffered two further miscarriages after her birth, leaving Juliana as the royal couple's only child.

Maho Beach

Maho Beach is a beach on the Dutch side of the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, in the territory of Sint Maarten. It is famous for the Princess Juliana International Airport adjacent to the beach.

Location

Due to the unique proximity of low flying airliners, the location is very popular with plane spotters. This is one of the few places in the world where aircraft can be viewed in their flight path just outside the end of the runway. Watching airliners pass over the beach is such a popular activity that daily arrivals and departures airline timetables are displayed on a board in most bars and restaurants on the beach, and the Sunset Bar and Grill has a speaker on its outside deck that broadcasts the radio transmissions between pilots and the airport's control tower. As of August 2015, they are no longer doing this.

Maho Beach is unusually close to the threshold of a runway, and is directly under the flight path, resulting in aircraft on their final approach flying over the beach at altitudes of less than 100 feet above ground level.

Sint Maarten

Sint Maarten (Dutch pronunciation: [sɪnt ˈmaːrtə(n)]) is an island country in the Caribbean. It is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It encompasses the southern 40% of the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, while the northern 60% of the island constitutes the French overseas collectivity of Saint-Martin. Its capital is Philipsburg. It has a population of 33,609 on an area of 34 km² (13 sq mi).

Before 10 October 2010, Sint Maarten was known as the Island Territory of Sint Maarten (Dutch: Eilandgebied Sint Maarten), and was one of five island territories (eilandgebieden) that constituted the Netherlands Antilles.

History

In 1493, during Christopher Columbus' second voyage to the West Indies, upon first sighting the island he named it Isla de San Martín after Saint Martin of Tours because it was 11 November, St. Martin's Day. However, though he claimed it as a Spanish territory, Columbus never landed there, and Spain made the settlement of the island a low priority.