Maho Beach

When the planes actually come

The big arrivals cluster in the afternoon, roughly from midday to six in the evening. Turn up at nine in the morning and you will mostly watch small commuter turboprops hopping in from other islands. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not what you came for.

The two transatlantic widebodies are the ones people wait for. Air France comes in during the afternoon and its approach passes closest to the sand. KLM tends to be one of the last significant arrivals of the day, usually somewhere between five and six, depending on how the winds treated it on the way across.

Neither of them comes every single day. If a specific big landing is the whole point of your trip to this beach, check the airport's arrivals board before you get in the taxi.

About that 747

You have seen the photo. A KLM jumbo jet, four engines, the underside of the wing practically at eye level, sand and people below.

That plane does not come here anymore. KLM switched its St. Maarten service to a twin engine Airbus A330 back in October 2016, and retired its 747 fleet entirely in 2020. Air France used to bring a four engine A340 too, and that has also stopped.

The biggest aircraft landing at Maho now are Air France and KLM A330s. They are still large, they still come in low, and standing under one is still a genuinely startling thing to experience. But if you are picturing the jumbo, adjust the picture. Nearly every famous Maho photograph in circulation shows an aircraft that stopped flying here years ago.

The sand is not a permanent feature

This is the part almost nobody mentions.

Maho's sand strips out in storms and comes back on its own. In August 2025, Hurricane Erin pulled it away and left rock where the beach had been. Hurricane Omar did the same thing in 2008. Sand has been trucked in and pumped back before now, and coastal engineers were studying how to hold it in place as far back as 2003.

It does return, sometimes surprisingly quickly. That is the cycle here. But it means a photo of Maho with a wide stretch of sand is a photo of one particular month, not a promise about yours. Some visitors arrive expecting a beach and find a narrow strip of rock with a spectacular view.

The fence

Take this part seriously.

In July 2017 a fifty seven year old visitor from New Zealand was holding the airport fence as a Boeing 737 powered up for departure. The jet blast blew her backwards. She struck her head on concrete and died at St. Maarten Medical Center. Police described it as the first fatality of its kind at Maho.

She was not the first person hurt there. Someone was seriously injured the same way in 2012, and a Swiss visitor in 2000. That earlier case went all the way to the Dutch Supreme Court, which ruled the airport had to put up clearer and more visible warning signs.

The signs on the fence say not to stand there. The runway starts about fifty metres away. The physics are not on your side and the concrete behind you does not move.

You are an adult and this is your call. Just make it knowing what happened here.

Should you spend the day?

Honestly, probably not, and that is fine.

Maho is an attraction that happens to have sand, not a beach day. It is narrow, it gets loud in the best way, and when the sand is thin there is barely room to put a towel down. Come for an hour or two in the afternoon, get the planes, have a drink, feel the noise in your chest.

Then drive ten minutes up the road to Mullet Bay for the actual swimming and the actual quiet. The two together make a genuinely good afternoon, and almost nobody plans it that way.