St. Maarten is an island in the Caribbean, famous among aviation people for Maho Beach. This is located at the end of the runway for Princess Juliana International Airport, where aircraft fly just metres above the beach when landing. Yesterday a Qatar Airways Airbus A340 did just that.
The Doha based airline doesn’t operate this aircraft, nor do they serve the island as one of their destinations. This makes this a very curious occurrence indeed.
Qatar Airways Airbus A340 Landing Video
Being a haven for plane spotters, there was no way this landing wasn’t going to be caught on video. Happily, it was and here it is coming in from the sun to land at the airport.
The aircraft is an Airbus A340-500 registered A7-HHH and as you can see is in the Qatar Airways livery. There were probably very few people on board and here’s why.
Qatar Amiri Flight
There is a VIP airline called the Qatar Amiri Flight, which is owned by the government of Qatar. This is used by the Royal Family and high level government staff. To keep it all a little incognito, the aircraft are mainly painted up in the colours of the national carrier.
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- They have three Boeing 747-8 BBJs, which must be fun to fly on.
In addition to the three jumbo jets, they have three Airbus A340s, two Airbus A330s, three Airbus A320s and three Airbus A319s. Very handy for when you need to be somewhere fast and can’t take a scheduled flight.
Overall Thoughts
It must have been a pleasant surprise for plane spotters seeing a Qatar Airways Airbus A340 suddenly appear out of the sun yesterday. I would have been really pleased to have witnessed that myself.
There are quite a lot of VIP aircraft flying around the world, with the larger ones being the most impressive. The Qatar Amiri Flight certainly does a good job of keeping things incognito with its Qatar Airways livery.
What do you think of the video? Did you know about the Qatar Amiri Flight? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Featured image by N509FZ via Wikimedia Commons.
Boeing 747-8 by Mehmet Mustafa Çelik on Airliners.net via Wikimedia Commons.
the royal family travels in a large airbus. They are seen as very concerned about climate change.
Phonies
Fair call!
I think this is the plane they gave to the orbis eye hospital
I don’t know about that, the Flying Eye Hospital uses an MD-10 – https://irl.orbis.org/en/what-we-do/flying-eye-hospital
Qatar seems to talk the talk and donate some pocket change to help out various causes that serve their moral and financial interests but the actual Orbis planes came from FedEx
Makes sense since the MD-10 was only a freighter!