20 JUL 2017: Last week when writing about the lunacy of running in front of a herd of angry bulls, I really thought that, as stupid tourist acts go, it simply couldn’t get any dumber. Then almost immediately, Gayleen McEwan a 57-year-old New Zealander vacationing on the tiny island of St. Maarten, tragically proved me wrong.

In a globally covered story she was blown to her death by a jet engine while indulging in an utterly ridiculous prank – I cannot subscribe to it being called a ‘sport’ – that has become known locally as ‘Fence Surfing.’

Just as Pamplona has its bulls, so too St. Maarten’s Princess Juliana International Airport has its infamous beach and chain-link fence at the end of its single runway. Despite foreboding signs warning visitors of the potential for jet-blast to cause, “… severe physical harm resulting in extreme bodily harm and/or death”, visitors flock to Maho Beach to photograph landing aircraft up close and to “fence surf” behind the engines of departing flights.

The 200 – 250 mph jet-blast from a departing Boeing 737 caused McEwan to lose her grip on the fence: She was violently blown backwards, hit her head on some nearby rocks and succumbed to her injuries shortly thereafter.

For years now, Internet video postings of swimwear-clad tourists joyfully lining up along the fence and being blasted with runway debris, stones and sand have attracted millions of viewers. It’s the kind of awareness-building publicity money simply cannot buy – a fact surely not lost on the St. Maarten tourism community. For the price of an airport fence, they get this goose laying golden eggs all over YouTube.

On vacationstmaarten.com, the island’s official site, first up on their ‘Beaches’ page (with a picture of an aircraft landing right above the beach) the copy extolls the fact that, “Maho Beach is one of the island’s most dramatic swimming spots. Swimmers enjoying a splash in the water can also experience the unusual thrill of airplanes passing right over their heads as they head for the nearby runway of Princess Juliana International Airport. The craggy rocks lining the white sand beach add another dramatic touch.” One can only assume these are the same rocks upon which the unfortunate Ms. McEwan met her maker. Elsewhere on the site the experience is described as a ‘must do’ when visiting the island.

This is by no means the first such incident at the airport albeit that it seems to be the first fatality: In 2000 a Swiss woman standing at the fence was blown over by the jet-blast from a KLM Boeing 747. She landed on a concrete block sustaining serious physical injuries. More recently in 2012, another young woman landed face first on the roadway after trying to flee the jet blast. How many other less serious injuries have gone unreported is anyone’s guess.

Islanders however already seem to be shrugging off this latest tragedy. This week, the island’s newspaper ‘The Daily Herald’ led with a headline of, “So the Future Looks Bright” and an article that jauntily discussed the signing of a new Open Skies Agreement between the US and St. Maarten.

The writer took pains to note that, “Although obviously unrelated, this show of confidence in the island’s aviation sector is all the more welcome after Wednesday’s tragic fatality at the runway fence. As pointed out before, the airport and local authorities have done just about all they can to warn of the danger and discourage purposely getting directly behind the jet engines right into the powerful jet blast, but people simply still do so for the thrill.”

It would have been more accurate to say “just about all they are prepared to do,” as clearly they can do a heck of a lot more. It is time for St. Maarten’s ‘powers-that-be’ to accept that something more than posting a few polite warning signs must be done here. It might also be prudent to remove the official website’s statement in the ‘Activities’ section that promotes the airport as, “A #1 activity: you can experience the very low-altitude landings and feel the tornadic (sic) takeoffs.”

Correct me for being persnickety here, but aren’t all aircraft landings “low altitude”?

The appropriate action is surely to put a definitive stop to this nonsense before some crazy ‘copycat’ manages to do it again. It would be simple enough to temporarily close that section of the road – and with it the fence – when an aircraft is about to take off. Yes there would be a direct cost attached in terms of manpower however the potential cost of more fatalities is far greater.

Had last week’s deceased hailed from the US rather than less litigious New Zealand, I suspect the inevitable multi-million dollar criminal negligence lawsuits against everyone from the airport authority, to the tourism authority, to the airline, to the engine manufacturer and maybe even the fence-maker, might well have grabbed their attention.

So please – enough already. And if islanders really need a replacement for the “tornadic” fence experience, maybe they should import a few “toros” from Pamplona!