Yeah...it's pretty cool. If you are sitting on the right side of the plane, it actually does appear to be heading in the water. My wife grabbed her seat and looked terrified this last time down. Thanks God I gave her the window seat. The look on her face was worth sitting in the middle for 4 hours.

No... the landing into St Thomas and St Croix is very ordinary. You can land in a prop plane or a larger airliner and unless you have flying phobias you will not be notice the difference, except the beautuful views.

When you approach you are able to see ocean and island. but at no time does it appear to be a scary carnival type ride.

However that is not the case when landing on some other Caribbean Islands. Some of the French and Dutch islands have short , rather tight landing strips. St Barts and Monserrat as well as St Eustasias, even Virgin Gorda
come to mind.

No scarier than landing at LaGuardia over the water - and a lot more beautiful, IMHO. And, you're at the "gate" very quickly, which is nice.

I would describe St. Croix as a different type of approach than St. Thomas. In STX, you fly over several miles of land before you reach the airport and you have a better view of the island before you touch down. In STT, you barely have a view of the mountains on the west end (and only from the left side of the plane) before you touch down, and yes it does look like you are heading into the water. However, over-water approaches can be found at NY LaGuardia and Boston's Logan airport, so the over-water thing is not entirely unusual to seasoned travelers.

I remember making the approach with my then 2 yr old seated by the window. She looked out, saw us going down and only saw water and yelled (as all 2 yr olds seem to YELL everything) "look! we're going down and we're about to make a biiiiiiig SPLASH!" Everyone on the place started to laugh. She's now 7 and when she sees us going down over the water she just says "we're here!".

It's not scary if you know that you really aren't landing in water and the runway is right there (you just can't see it). It's a smoothe landing - much smoother than what I experience at most US airports, surprisingly. You won't have the roller coaster effect of Philly, Denver, Vegas, Chicago, etc.

For any old timers, the runway extension out over the water and removal of part of the mountain on the other side is a blessing after the former "much too short" runway caused great casualty in the 70s. Not to mention the fact that we can fly in non-stop, rather than the old mandatory route through Puerto Rico.