“Heroic sink rate”. Where would we be without Paul Bertorelli?!

I could listen to Paul Bertorelli’s reports all day. The perfect mix of informative and entertaining. Great job as always. 😊

This guy is the Tom Bodett of aviation videos. I could seriously binge on these. Interesting content, no irritating music, and wryly humorous and well-crafted copy. Good work sir!

I have over 500 landings at St Barts. The Twin Otters usually fly a much steeper approach as their STOL ability allows them to. Typically they will be able to see the numbers the whole way down. We were flying Aztecs and couldn't approach that steep safely. Our procedure was much like the islander in this video - cross the ridge and follow it down at weed mowing height. While the Pilatus was a little low, you do have to skim that ridge to avoid being fast and high. We would get the gear and flaps down and stabilize at blue line about a mile out. Call the non tower and be sure the runway was clear as you can't see it. Cross (more like skim) the ridge about 10kts below blue line, and push the nose down. The angle is steep enough you accelerate towards the numbers. Trade winds buffet you, lots of rudder work. At 20 feet raise the nose, but the sink rate doesn't change much as you are fairly slow. Add a burst of power to arrest the descent. Plant it. This cannot be overstated, no time to be delicate. Get the nose on the ground, flaps up, and brake hard. If you aren't braking hard by those checkerboards you see on the pavement edges, go around. You won't be able to stop in time as the runway is downhill to the beach. We'd brake firmly to be sure we made it, then ease off to the beach. Saved the brakes some, and you sometimes had a topless French babe wave at you as you turned the airplane. The Baron that hit the beach was way out of profile. Not even close. Obvious lack of local training and no awareness of the need to go around. Runway 28 was for East winds under 6 knots or calm. West winds essentially never happen unless it's a storm. The approach is lower than the mountain peaks and you are in close to them. Turn final over the bay and take a good look at the runway. Here you decide to commit. The is zero chance for a go-around, the ridge rises too fast. If something enters the runway, take the grass, but DO NOT go around. Paul Wikander (Virgin Air) had a photo of his DC-3 in St Barts in his office. Apparently that stemmed from a wager, which he won.

I spent a winter flying PA-23 Aztecs into SBH daily, sometimes 2 or 3 times a day. Loved it, but often wished for the reverse thrust capability of a Twin Otter. They gave us a little license to fly in there (mid 1980's), and I sure wish I had kept it for old time sake. One of the fun parts was seeing passenger's reaction when the runway finally came into view on final. Landing on 28 is easy if the wind allows (rare event, but we had a two week period in December when the wind reverses and it was called "the Christmas winds"). But if the wind favors 28, you can't take off on 28 so that meant a tailwind takeoff on Rwy 10 which was always much scarier than any landing at SBH. In any event, the fresh-out-of-the-oven French bread at the bakery across the street from the airport was always a worthy reward. Good memories!

Experts say you should use this one simple trick to extend your stay on a tropical island.

Paul could I say your laconic and understated brand of humour is so suited to the Australian audience, it’s almost like you’ve been here or have Australian family 😂

This video is a fantastic example of an informative presentation that is comprehensive, concise and entertaining...a rarity these days. Cheers to you Paul Bertorelli.

Paul’s narration is so soothing, thoroughly enjoyable, great story.

Always a worthwhile viewing. THX Paul!

Another factor in landing at St. Barts SBH/TFFJ is wind. There are three windsocks and it's not uncommon for them not to agree with each other. If the normal easterly winds are 8 knots or less, you land on runway 28. One of my landings on runway 10 was 9 knots, gusts to 20 knots. DHC-6s and PC-12s have the advantage of running props into Beta, to shorten roll out. You are required to have a current Letter of Authorization or a local flight instructor onboard.

As a glider pilot, getting only once chance, you do learn how to manage the energy and speed. Excellent discussion on speed control Paul! Keep the lessons coming!

The Arrow could have saved it, not by adding power at 100’ but at 400’ and going around. All the cues of an unstable approach were right there. Even on short fields, a stable approach is critical.

Always fun to hear your commentary. I would love to fly with you someday, Paul.

I’ve ridden in on a twin otter into this airport. They cheat quite heavily flying in there. We came over the hill quite hot. I expected a go-around because of the excess speed. But we got. Over the numbers, the pilot reached up and hit the reverse thrusters and we came to a stop almost immediately.. I had a quick chat with the pilot and he just smiled when I mentioned the speed and the stopping prowess…

What makes this approach even more challenging is the occasional high wind rates that creep up the hillside.

I doubt the accuracy of the sim - the brakes on the A380 probably wouldn't work quite that well in real life. But I suppose clipping the wingtips on the trees and light posts would make up for that...

Me laughing hysterically at the 40 sec mark. His commentary is great

Great video. Paul you are a natural at commentary and wonderfully witty as well!

And remember: Treat every approach as a missed approach.

An added thought here is the most successful aircraft landing here has reversible props.

One of the best and most informative specialised landing videos yet. Laconic, too, l like that, Thank you 🤗🤗🤗 …….. Will share it with family member pilot 😊👍

Thank you for sharing Paul.

Another great one thanks Paul 😃

I love flying into this airport in the simulator. I'm not good at it, but I have a lot of fun.

Paul, what software do you use to create those simple 2D animations? Thanks!

One of my favorites in Microsoft Flight Sim -- guess that's as close as I'll ever come.

One of the best aviation videos I've seen in a long time.

Very informative without the excessive hype

Nice presentation with some humor. All your points are valid and good advice.

Loved your narration. I had a good laugh. Thanks.

Excellent Paul. I've made that trip several times, not as a pilot, and it's great fun.

I love your sarcasm. Helps the learning!

Sarcasm is an integral part of these videos!!! Very informative video and entertaining the same time!

That 380 had No.3 and No.4 ingesting vast amounts of landscape!

Great stuff, Paul. Love the sim landing…🤣🤣

The gear almost held.

Great stuff. Thanks for posting.

Reminds me of the trick my "cousin" Jimmy Doolittle used to use to slow down when he had an emergency landing in a farmer's field while barnstorming. Use a tree hooked by a wing to make a ground loop.

Excellent stuff bro

love love loved it paul!

pilots should have enough fuel to go around for 30 minutes until you get it right

The BN islanders and trilanders too, are still at it in the Caribbean. Have been in both in the last couple years ✈️

I’m certified to fly in and out of there in a Caravan on amphibians. That hill on the approach end of runway 10 is no joke. Great video!

great commentary and observations (making it pretty funny in some spots) . Thanks.

I just discovered and have been flying the Twin Otter in X-Plane lately. What a plane! Certainly perfect for that approach.

Brings back memories, for sure. My flight school had a 1600 foot runway. There was no sand trap at the end but there were a bunch of trees out there, and the damn things grew taller every year. We could land our 152s on half the runway but needed every inch on takeoff. Once we staggered into the air we'd have to do a quick left bank to miss a big one, followed by a right to miss another. Interesting close-up views of the branches out the side windows. We could handle it OK but some pilots unfamiliar with the place would crash into things, usually the chain-link fence and airfield sign at the other end. Fun times.

Nice video. I guess the Arrow pilot forgot the part about "if you're not comfortable with the approach, go around".

Flew for Virgin Air St. Thomas. Barts, during Christmas winds period would sometimes call for landings over the beach which I actually preferred. My boss took his DC-3 in without permission & got in trouble with gendarmes.

Managing your energy is the most important part of making a landing happen where you want it, anybody who trains in a c172 knows five too many knots over the fence is five stripes past where you told the DPE you were gonna land the plane, or forcing it down in a less than buttery manner.

Thanks Paul. I was wondering about 28. The reciprocal towards the hill looks good.

Love the Twin Otters! Noisy as heck inside but true go-anywhere workhorses.

I watched a heavy jumbo take off on ChCh NZ cross short run way once. It must have been a test. The pilot had to use power to do a super tight turn skidding the nose wheel in the process to get to the runway, then with the outer engines over the grass and full power the plane created a huge dust storm as it rolled the length of the runway. Spectacular to see.

What a great video!

How are all of your videos so well put together? You should just start your own patreon. You are like a brand name in high quality aero journalism. Bravo. Still wondering how you picked this for a video topic, but it was equal parts informative and entertaining, which is a hard act to follow.

Great presentation.

Brilliant! Amazing!

I loved being a passenger flying in and out of St Barts and watching from the hill where there is a traffic rotary was eventful. Miss that place.

Everyday I check to see if Paul has made a video about the RedBull plane swap incident.

I landed a 727 on an aircraft carrier in X-Plane 10 once, but there's no way I'd attempt an A380 at St. Barth's in X-Plane. That's just madness.

I love this channel!

I’ve landed twice in a PC12 (as a passenger) and both times they greased it on. The pilot said no two landings are the same at St. Barts.

My first ever flight in a light plane was in the right seat of a Britten Norman Islander flying over the marvellous bahama banks in 1969. 3 years later i bought a Luscombe and learned to fly. Amazing airplanes.

The sarcasm had me laughing! Brilliant!

I recognized the air strip immediately from the thumb nail. I lived there full time for 3.5 years. I first landed there in 1982. Everyone jumped in their own cars(locals) and took off. I stood there like an idiot with my passport in my hand. It was about 11AM and NO customs or immigration were around. In fact, NOBODY was there. Not a soul. I lugged my large bag to the top of the ridge and hitch hiked in to town (Gustavia) which was actually quite close. I put 75% down payment on a sailboat and moved aboard. By 1985, a full airport facility was built on the other side of the landing strip. Car rentals etc. I MISS the quaint 1982 St Barts. Oh, well. I sure was glad to experience it. The island was AMAZING until 1985 when extreme rapid construction and growth killed its charm. About 25 of us ex-pats left there in 1985. I moved to St Maarten Dutch West Indies, and then Tortola in the BVI

A great video and really well constructed explanation of the solution (s). Could there be another civil engineering solution, in rerouting the vehicular traffic lower around the hill and therefore allowing the approaching aircraft a shallower descent? This would be after a few tonnes of the hillside are removed.

That is a terrifying downhill approach

Failed Harrier approachs should be the title of this video lol

1. Retract gear on approach 2. Slide on belly downhill 3. Extend gear at end 4. Roll out on runway. 😀😀

My favorite airfield of all time is Rankin (78Y) in Maryville MO. Its an almost textbook short field which (used to be) 1300 feet of concrete with another 1100 of gravel in case you mess up, minus displacement from an obstacle to the north, and is quite narrow over the paved part. It feels like landing on a bike trail but it's great practice for emergency precision. It looks like they have since paved the whole thing but it's still much narrower than the humorously named Jet Rd. to the West.

Very Cool 😎 I used to fly for the only U.S. air carrier that was allowed/authorized to operate into/out of TFFJ. It did require extra training, which my boss developed for the French. TFFJ is classified as a "Hazardous airport" under ICAO standards. Due to the fact that you can not fly a stabilized approach to get in there.

That A380 is my new bizjet that I landed there last week at Barts... I was blindfolded and had both hands tied behind my back too!

Gustaf III, named after the Swedish 18th century king. Be careful at theaters, and that airport!

My instructor used a neat trick. Take a grease pencil and make a crosshair on the windscreen horizon. For a normal landing point that crosshair at the numbers and use throttle, yes throttle to ctrl a/s. As the nose crosses over the numbers, pitch to level as you close the throttle and then as the plane settles pitch to one finger, then 2 fingers width above the horizon for perfect landing attitude in a Cherokee. You have use maybe 3 fingers for a cessna. This works a lot more precisely than the old "pitch for airspeed, power for altitude." For short field put croshair 2bfingers width below the horizon in cruise, then slow down on approach and aim the crosshair on the numbers as you use slow flight descent for the shortfield. It works terrifically and instilled sight picture and speed control into my airline days.

I bet a Mooney ovation, bravo, etc., would be a treat to drop in there. You'd have to be right on speed maybe a knot or two under, maybe 3 under approach speed. Those birds love to float!

I learned on Zenair ultralight. That sets you up to learn STOL landings, slips and crosswind landings that carry you through to other aircraft as you progress.

jesus christ even after years it still boggles my mind how this guy from the first landing didn't go around but decided to float the shit out of that twin till he was halfway in bikini bottom. smh big time

Need a cable and tail hook there!

I'm glad I was raised on a 2000 foot hole in the woods. The old man taught me how to make an approach with accuracy.

I learned a long time ago, flying RC glider comp, that the best way to land short with an unusually steep approach, is to trim the plane to high AOA above the min sink AOA. This gives you very high CDi , making the approach slow and steep. That way, you do not need to wash off excess airspeed before touch down & therefore, you will not overrun the landing. If you instead aim the plane down the hill, you will have to land with excessive speed & will either overrun the touch down or you will have to plonk it down at speed & jam the stick forward & flaps up in hopes of pulling it up on the ground . Neither option is great. For a steep slow approach, while you have height, ease the stick back a little. The plane will flare & float until you wash off airspeed. When the nose tries to drop in response to the reduced airspeed, pull back on the stick more to maintain attitude at the slower airspeed, (faster than stall but slower that for min sink rate). This gives the plane it's steepest possible stable approach & you land slow too. However you are flying the approach closer to stall speed, so I guess it's one thing to do this in RC & another to have the nerve to do so from the cockpit. I sometimes wonder is pilots know about this technique at all?

The best part, if you are "lucky", is now you get to manage an aircraft repair far from home....

Interesting video. I wonder how far that A380 would have traveled in the lake before stopping. This looks like a Sully land strip.

"That's kind of a carrier landing but without the tailhook, the ramp or the LSO" Or carrier-grade landing gear xD

Collapsing the main gear on a P28 is no mean feat... That hit hard.

"cram it in there"! Funny!! 😂🤣😂🤣

When I was learning to fly, way back in the mid-70s, I flew out of Waterford, CT. We had 15, 18, 33, and 36. Runway 36 was permanently closed because at the departure end of it was a huge hill. I would guess that the hill was probably about the same height above the airport as the one at St. Barts is, except it was a little further back. Between the hill and the end of the runway, I-95 ran through. The wind usually favored 18 anyway, but you could use 15, which brought you in over the same ridge, but it wasn't quite as high, and you had a lot more room to get down. They used to fly Twin Otters in there on occasion when Groton airport went below minimums with fog. The difference between St. Barts and Waterford was that Waterford had trees on top of the hill. More than once did I pick small twigs and leaves out of the landing gear on the 150 I was flying. Waterford closed years ago, but you can still find the outline of it on Google Earth, just east of the Coca-Cola bottling plant. It sat down in a valley, and it's really hard to see how low it actually was.

I'm now tempted to land at this airport in MSFS with windy conditions

Doesn't really look any worse than a number of strips around here that are only 1800' long but have 125' trees on both ends. Technique is fairly straightforward. Have your airspeed 1.1Vso right over the top of the trees, once clear of those, pitch the nose down, but use a forward slip to make the aircraft draggy and avoid the speed up, when you get to the ground you will be right at the end of the runway at 1.2Vso. Some airports like Whitter AK that have the same hill are only used from the other end, so you have to wait for favorable winds. One last point, if you aren't going to make it, go around!

WOW that's it Great video

I wonder what the A&P rates are at that airport. I expect they're not cheap, and work progresses on "island time." p.s. for ground loops, you're supposed to loop _on_ the ground, not _in_ it.

In the 1980s, I was in that airport and earlier in St. Georges in the Bahamas. In both, they did not take wrecked hulks away, all the time. In this airport, having our flight delayed because the owner of the airline was required to fly his own plane into the airport, “since their other plan crashed’ (that’s what they said) was disheartening. AND, this tiny airport did not have the resources to remove earlier crashed aircraft. Seeing those deceased aluminum hulks resting in the bush is not the best confidence gainer. I survived & living in St. Thomas, VI.🌴💙

it amazes me that guy did not get his head taken off. Just like St Marteen - which has had what? 5 fatalities now due to jet blast and yeeting people causing severe and fatal injuries ( Cue up the female who got slammed into a Concrete K-barrier ) St Barts is trending now with these thrill seekers that someone is going to get slapped by a plane's landing gear or the plane itself and that recent short video is evidence of it.

While I, like most of us here, will only land there in a sim, it's still an excellent basis for your refresher on the basic physics of landing any plane in any conditions, including the long strips of asphalt surrounded by very flat corn (and soybeans - less cushioning in case of a Dan Gryder-esque mishap) in my area.

That runway is insane!

Love it!

My trip to Europe on one Labor Day weekend. Three of the ten worst airports. The airline sold a ticket to a passenger after flight left, so we had to stop in the UK at Beef Island. Then to France and St. Barth's. When we tried to confirm our flight home the airline explained that the flight we were to go on was not flying. We had to book a trip back to St. Thomas via the Netherlands. So a landing at Sint Maarten.

Dang. That was good! A like has been tendered.

in Vietnam we had a runway that was on a hill but the runway started at the top of the hill. so the planes could come in slow and low. we still had the problem with bigger planes like the C130 almost going off the end of the downhill slope. the C130 was by far the largest plane landing on this runway. most of the time we has C47's landing. C130 was a special flight bringing in a personel carrier for Special Forces. 1965

Gotta say I love this approach in flight sim in a twin turboprop beech

I spent a week at SBH back in 2007 flying the Pilatus for Tradewind; the first landing was *memorable*. Best part of turboprop power is beta thrust.