Try to imagine relaxing on the beach at this stretch of sand.... St. Maarten, where sand meets metal!
hehehe I've seen that one before, if I remember correctly it featured in the 10 worst landings in the world In my opinion they missed the landing at Caticlan on Aklan in the Phils, that airport approach was often downright scary crosswinds ,short runway, awkward approach and serious humidity problems on the aircraft Here is an example or two from inside the plane of one of our approaches to Caticlan (on the way to Boracay) On approach to the runway, the cockpit door was open and it was just the same for the pilots as it was for us, there was water dripping from every surface Ana in the window seat with her niece who we treated to a short break in Boracay Asian Spirit airlines, they no longer exist, but they used to say "Asian Spirit - take off as Asians arrive as Spirits" They are now called Zest Airways Sean.
If that red car in the first vid had been a second or so slower it would have had tyre tracks on its roof That KLM 747 really got on the ground really early, that was only one plane length, about 70 metres or so before you could see the tyre smoke
Don't worry mate they are a good airline, they might have had the worst air accident in history in 1977 but that was exceptional circumstances (terrorist's elsewhere in the Canary islands) in general they are a very well run very professional airline.
I recall reading about that accident a few years ago; the primary blame was laid with the pilot of the KLM 747 for taking off without clearance. But it is always easier to blame someone who is no longer alive to defend himself - and here I am thinking of the RAF Chinook helicopter crash in 1995, when the pilot was initially blamed and only finally cleared of any blame last year.
Would that be the Casa CN125? I remember travelling with Zest on their Casa and getting the smoke treatment. What an experience! Zest used to have such a diverse fleet, from Japanese made YS11 to some old ex-Libyan Dash-7's and they even had a BAE146 or 2 for a while, you never knew in advance what metal you would be flying in. I remember flying in one of Cebu Pac's old DC9 back in 2004 - these jets were built like tanks, they could have lasted another 10 years.
It was the de Havilland Dash 7 Rob. We also flew on the BAE146 at least once They all suffered from the internal cloud problem to some extent or other We had one return flight to Manila where the aircraft appeared to have a problem of some kind, the pilot kept us at very high altitude until we were well past Lake Taal and over Laguna then he just headed for the ground at a ridiculous rate swung out over the bay turned right to swing round to the domestic runway and came in from the north, that was a really scary decent, the pilot had seemed to be crabbing all the way back, in that the plane was going first one way then he had to correct it back the other way almost like he could not balance the engine power or either wing. Quite and experience on Asian Spirit I guess Zest are pretty much the same
Yeah it was pretty clearly the KLM pilots fault but none of it would have happened if they had not all been diverted due to the bomb at Gran Canaria, that and various other circumstances conspired to make things pretty hard for him. In the end though he took off without clearance.
