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General information

Second Baltic tour is a story of a flying holiday. The flying holiday lasted for 3 days and included 3 different airfields. This page has pictures, videos and stories of the events that took place during the journey.
Photos and sometimes films were taken from airfields. You can go and see the those airfield specific photos and films by clicking the name of the airfield anywhere in the text. Use your web browsers back to previous page button to get back to this page.
Airfields visited during the journey in order of visit: Kuressaare, Estonia (EEKE) Ventspils, Latvia (EVVA) and Klaipeda, Lithuania (EYKL).

Main reason to the trip was to took part to the Spring Cruise for Experimentally Minded Pilots.

Start of this story contains general information of this journey. After the start, each day has its own chapter and in the end there are statistics gathered from the journey.

Time and weather

At the time of the journey, the weather in Southern Finland and in Baltic area was hot and humidity was high. Combination of hot air and high humidity percentage told us to expect rain and thunder. Monitoring weather changes and analysing weather took therefore major part from all the discussions made.

Route

Route took us first to Estonia and from there to Latvia and Lithuania and back again to Finland via Latvia and Estonia.

First day

During the first day I flew via Kuressaare to Ventspils.
This meant that we had to cross the Gulf of Finland (photos below). Photos below where taken near Hanko, where always so pleasant ocean cruising started.



Crossing the ocean when according to all the traditions... listening engine and monitoring engine instruments. Where an earth does that interest always arises?



All went well and soon there where Estonia's islands Hiidenmaa and Kuressaare below. Photo below was taken above Kuressaare.


For this trip, a 10 inch tablet computer was installed for additional information. Tablet contained all the maps, approach and landing charts etc.

During the flight the tablet was running Air Navigation Pro application, that had the planned route pre programmed.

Cockpit in RV-4 is already normally fairly tight so with tablet on board it was tight to say at least. In photo below, plane is approaching Kuressaare airport. Distance to airfield is 10Nm (19km), speed is 178mph (290km/h, 155Nm/h) and in 4 minutes it's time to join traffic circuit.

Free airspace (G) above the right leg is temporary, as at the time of photo shoot air navigation chart was removed from there (after the photo shoot the airspace in question changed back to class C).

There is a video from landing to Kuressaare.

After spending few moments and filling up the fuel tanks in Kuressaare the trip continued towards Ventspils. Costline in Latvia was as beautiful as before... sand beaches all the way to the horizon.


To Ventspils everybody arrived as planned. The following has all the crews and their planes introduced:

PIK-25 Varttimarkka OH-XXV Jarmo and Juhani
Jarmo was the Spring Cruise for Experimentally Minded Pilots event's leader and originator.


RV-6 OH-XMT Lasse
Cessna 180H OH-CER Ossi and Seppo


Beechcraft Musketeer OH-BMH Johannes and Jaakko


RV-4 OH-XKD Tero


Johannes and Jaakko who arrived with their Beechcraft had taken into consideration the heat exceptionally well. Their arrived by flying at FL100. Main reason for this was arguably the freezing temperature at that altitude that made it possible to cool down the beer that was offered to everyone. This remarkable generosity and visionary act was gracefully thanked by everybody.

We really didn't see much of the city of Ventspils as we arrived to city quite late and trip continued in the following morning. However, even after few decades of absence, some glamour from Soviet era was still there.


All we needed was bed and breakfast and this was a place that full filled that need just fine.

Second day

Right after breakfast we continued our journey towards Lithuania and Klaipeda airfield.

Photos below where taken above Latvia. Small dot at the photo above is OH-BMH.



Photos below where taken above Lithuania. A very large river had been here centuries ago and since then people had build a hole city into the bottom of that ancient river. Apparently locals had great confidence, that nature had no use for that place any more... for original use.



We all arrived by following our own route and timetable to Klaipeda and there where local flyers to welcome us. There is a video from landing to Klaipeda.

Our welcome party was very friendly and their where willing to help us in all matters. Their took care of us in everything: from transportation of fuel to taking us to have some breakfast and from ordering taxis to booking hotel rooms. So we had great service at this airfield.

Only thing that worried this Nordic person coming from a place that is a the heaven for rule makers was that how much this all is gonna cost us. In the end, nobody asked anything, so in the end we paid the amount what we felt was right.


AN-2 is master of its own class. Apparently enough of these have been build, as there as still few of these at almost every Baltic area airfield that we visit.

As you can see at the photo below, attachment point for airplanes where stiff enough, but apparently meant for larger planes than ours.



At this point everybody had a touch of food in their minds, so it was time to go to Klaipeda center and have something to eat. We where taken to a restaurant area that was located in a nice area and had a nice atmosphere.


After a very tasty and versatile meat meal we moved back to airfield to fill up the tanks. At this point in time some experimentalist atmosphere was seen and felt when detail analysis on AN-2 parts where seen to take over the other activity.


When all the planes where ready for next day's flight, it was time go on a beach and enjoy beatiful weather and sea.



When we arrived back to the airfield, where our hotel was also located, it was time to make a important decision... shall we continue our trip or head back to home first thing on the morning.

It seemed based on weather forecast, that it would be easy to continue our trip during Saturday to center of Lithuania, but during Sunday we could not fly anywhere. Any bad weather forecast was not only for Sunday but it was also for next few days after Sunday. However, based on weather forecast for Saturday morning, it would still be possible, during Saturday morning, to return back to Finland.

Below has a picture of rain forecast from Sunday... that actually came true.

Decision was to head straight back to home first thing in the morning. It seemed based on weather forecast, it would be easier to get north by using routes on the west. Therefore, everybody decided to first fly to Kuressaare and then head straight to Hanko (though one crew decided not go towards Hanko). This was the same route as I had used earlier at the start of this trip.

Third day

On the morning we all started to fly towards home and during this I saw OH-BMH.


Thurders where expected and expectations where met. Photo below was taken above the sea between Latvia and Estonia. At this point one thunder area was passed / avoided successfully with hardly no rain above, but view in front did not promise too much. The thunder area that was passed was so large and active that radio communication through it could not be made so change of frequency to Estonian frequencies was decided by the weather. At times plenty of lightning was also visible.


After a long discussion with Kuressaare tower about the weather at front, my decision was to land to Kuressaare and wait for a better weather. So this flight was stopped for now. All the other planes following me (except one) made the same decision.

After we had done some weather analysis at ground, it seemed that we could continue our trip to home after about three hours. Therefore we decided to go to city. First we fed our hunger for culture in Kuressaare castle and then we fed that traditional hunger in restaurant. As before, food was excellent, so the spirits went up again.



After the break we started our engines again and new try towards home could start. Now there was only a memory left from a storm that had passed... some humidity there and there but no rain above and no storm winds around us.

Picture below was taken towards west when crossing the Gulf of Finland. That's where the storm had made its way.


At Hanko the sun was shining from a cloudless sky and below we had a familiar home country.

Statistics

Summary:

Table below has all the flights and their statistics.



It is possible to calculate the energy efficiency in airplanes by getting a relative figure between the amount of used fuel and achieved speed. When flying, the resistance from the air towards the airplane triples when speed doubles. So if you fly the same route by achieving an average speed of 68Nm/h (78mph, 126km/h) and you use less than 58,3 MPG (US) (4l/100km) of AVGAS fuel, the plane's, that you have, aerodynamics, engine and propeller have together better efficiency than what these figures tell about this journey. To achieve the mentioned average speed, your cruising speed must probably be about 80-85Nm/h (92-98mph, 148-158km/h).

Table below has the figures of total fuel consumption in different units.



Table below has the average and maximum speeds from different flights.

Summary

Weather had a big impact on this trip. Time to fly home was considered in many discussions and in the end time for that came a day earlier than originally was planned For me it was really interesting to monitor the changes in weather and how more experienced pilots analysed the weather and possibilities on continuing the trip.

Anyhow, yet again absolutely a great tour with an excellent fellow crews.