Regional airports 3 out of 6 'scariest'

“Spectacular” or “scary” landings are a popular international media topic for the immediate region, and recently the airports of St. Maarten, St. Barths and Saba were featured as three of just six of the “scariest airport runway landings in the world” by high-visibility technology news outlet BRG.

Only Nepal’s Lukla Airport near Mount Everest, once voted by the History Channel as the most extreme airport in the world; Courchevel Altiport in the French Alps, built into the side of a mountain with a runway sloping at a gradient of 18.6 per cent; and Gibraltar International Airport closely surrounded by buildings, the Rock of Gibraltar and which has a runway running across a four-lane city highway, also made the list.

The list started “without question” with Princess Juliana International Airport SXM with the runway “eerily close to a tourist friendly beach” and included St. Barths’ narrow Gustaf III Airport, close to the hillside and water, and Saba’s Juancho E. Yrausquin Airport with its shortest commercial runway in the world.

BRG, which normally focuses reviews on consumer electronics, had been featuring videos of aircraft “taking off at breakneck speed and astounding angles,” and switched to unique airport runways around the world as a follow-up, featuring video and pictures of each featured runway.

BRG boasts more than 11 million monthly unique visitors and is amongst the most popular technology news sites in the world, rated by Quantcast as the number 300 website in all of the United States.

Source: The Daily Herald.