Gotland and Estonia

Earlier this summer I was “chartered” by my wife for a trip to Visby and Tallinn. My youngest son went along with us. The trip wasn’t exceptional, but it was the first time I was flying to one of the Baltic states. Also, I think that both Gotland and the Baltic states are not usual destinations for most EuroGA readers.

We used my club PA28-181 with a complete IFR panel including a GNS430 and an old (but nicely working) Piper Autocontrol single-axis autopilot.

DAY 1 Uppsala/Sundbro – Visby

The trip from Uppsala to Visby on the first day was the only one with slightly tricky weather. This was a day when the GRAMET didn’t give a very good picture of the situation.

There were actually convective clouds along the whole route and there were also some thunderstorms forecast. I didn’t expect any real problem, though. Stockholm/Skavsta – about 20 miles to the side of my route – reported CBs, but before take-off I checked the radar pictures and that CB was clearly dissolving.

My home base, Uppsala/Sundbro, is an uncontrolled airport, so I needed to pick up my clearance in the air. There was some soaring activity, which usually means that the soaring club has activated soaring sectors in Stockholm TMA. Sure enough, I couldn’t get my IFR clearance because of the soaring activity. I had to climb VFR initially until clear of the soaring sectors. Fortunately there was only scattered Cu cloud which I could fly around. With a broken or overcast layer, you can get stuck underneath and unable to climb until clear of the soaring sectors which can take 15 minutes or more if you’re going the “wrong” way.

This time I got my clearance after about 5 minutes and proceeded to climb to my cruising altitude of FL100. There was some remnants of the Cb laying around and I picked up traces of ice in cruise, but nothing of any significance. Then a visual approach to RWY 21 in Visby.

After refueling (€2.30/l for AVGAS), we parked on the aeroclub apron. There is also a grass parking area next to the main apron. The grass on both is good enough that even Peter should be satisfied.

The aeroclub has several fixed-gear TB9 and TB10 aircraft.

The first week of July in Visby is known as the “politician week” where “everyone” involved in Swedish politics meet for discussions, speeches, seminars, interviews and lobbying. My wife was going to participate in some of the seminars, so she was actually on business and would be reimbursed for the cost of the flight. :-) (No, she is not a politician – she’s a professor – the seminars were about Science Centres.)

You’ll find political parties and organisations (here a MEP from the Swedish Green Party being interviewed)…

…interest organisations, government authorities (here the stands of the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions and the Swedish Union of Tenants)…

…lobbying organisations, NGO’s, media, companies, you name it! (Here an activist from Amnesty International)

The tradition started in 1968 when late prime minister Olof Palme held an impromptu speech from a flatbed lorry in this park and it has grown ever since. Visby is a UNESCO World Heritage site because of its well-preserved medieval city center – you can see parts of the 13th century city wall.

DAY 2 Visby – Tallinn

We have a summer house south of Visby where we stayed the night. In the late afternoon, after my wife had finished her business, we set off for Estonia. The weather was nice with high temperatures, few cumulus and very good visibility. When we got to the airport, this beauty had just arrived – there would be lobbying activities by the aviation industry the next day.

The trip required some “Eurocontrol hacking”. Since this was going to be an extended overwater flight, I wanted to fly as high as possible (FL100 as I had no oxygen) and also keep the time out of gliding range from land as short as possible. The autorouter suggested a route via NEREN which I felt was unnecessarily far from land. That route made a detour to avoid Riga FIR. I tried a more direct route closer to land through Riga FIR via RASEL and PIMEX, but that was rejected because there was no airway connecting them and Latvia didn’t permit DCTs. Controlled airspace started at FL95, so I successfully filed the more direct route at FL90 with the intention of requesting FL100 in the air. I was clearly not the first one to do this – after being handed over to Sweden Control, the controller straightaway asked if FL90 was actually my intended cruising level.

There was a lot of traffic in Visby with extra commercial flights for the politician week. ATC used both runways and we departed from RWY 28, a grass runway south of the main runway, with a right turn on track.

My wife in the right-hand seat handled the camera.

We had a good view of the city on initial climb-out, but unfortunately it was on my side of the aircraft, so no photos. We got some nice pictures of northeastern Gotland, though.

Limestone production and processing was an important local industry and there are still several active quarries, like this one in Slite:

Several abandoned quarries are used as “swimming pools”. The water is much warmer than in the sea and Gotland has few lakes. My family goes bathing in this one every summer when we visit Gotland.

RASEL and PIMEX are compulsory reporting points for Riga FIR, so I got the opportunity of making a proper position report at RASEL – that doesn’t happen often these days.

After being handed over to Tallinn from Riga, I was unable to make contact for about 5 minutes. Apart from that the trip was uneventful. Interestingly, the autorouter flight tracking stopped the moment we entered Tallinn FIR, as you could see on the picture above.

At all times the over the open sea we could see several ships. I’m not really worried about overwater flights, but the ships give you some extra piece of mind in case you have to ditch.

In the next picture the Estonian island Hiiumaa (Dagö in Swedish and German). Historically, it had a sizable Swedish population.

We got a visual approach into Tallinn as well. The airport is located just to the east (right in the picture) of the lake and easy to find in the air. There was very little traffic.

The windscreen could use some cleaning.

Since it was getting late, we decided on refueling before departure the next day. We were met on the GA apron by a marshaller who chocked the wheels the moment I shut down the engine. A bus was already there to take us to the terminal. Very efficient!

The trip to Estonia was of personal interest to my wife. Her grandmother was born there in the early 20th century as the daughter to a Russian army officer. The great-grandmother left a diary with interesting glimpses into upper middle-class life at the time. They had a summer house in the village Võsu on the coast of the gulf of Finland. When World War I began they left that village, never to return. After the war the family went to Helsinki – Russian army officers were not very popular either in the newly formed Soviet union or in the now independent Estonia. The grandmother eventually found her way to Sweden. My wife wanted to visit the village and try to find the old summer house – her grandmother had a photograph of it taken in the early 20th century.

We spent the night in a hotel in Sagadi, a mansion close to Võsu – now a museum.

The hotel was in one of the wings of the mansion. The main hotel building had wings of its own for the hotel rooms.

DAY 3 Tallinn – Visby

Most things in Estonia were quite cheap. At the hotel, a very nice room for two with buffet breakfast was €80. Petrol for the rental car and groceries were also substantially cheaper than in Sweden.

There were many nice old buildings in Võsu. We were not certain that we found the one in the old photo, but this was the most likely candidate.

The day was hot, so we went down to the beach for a swim. The nature was surprisingly similar to that of Gotland. This picture could just as well have been taken there. (Except for the Estonian flag, that is.)

After the visit to Võsu it was time to head back to the airport for the flight to Visby. We made a quick stop next to Tallinn old town for dinner. We didn’t have time for a proper visit, but at least we got a picture:

At the airport, we had some trouble with the security check. The airport staff member who escorted us first asked if we had any fluids. We did, so she said that the pilot (me) should carry them through the security check. Apparently pilots have some concessions. My wife got into trouble with a comb that had a metal piece which by a large stretch of imagination could be taken as a weapon. (She had carried this in her handbag for years through lots of airport security checks without any comment.) The security officer demanded to see her boarding pass and when she didn’t have one he got into a fit. It took at least three explanations from our escort that it was a private flight and several discussions with his colleagues before he would let her pass (without the comb, of course).

I don’t understand the reasoning here. Why did we need to pass the security check at all when we were anyway escorted straight to our aircraft on the GA apron by bus? And why is the pilot of a private flight permitted to bring certain items which the passengers are not? Of course I could have any amount of “dangerous” articles in the aircraft already. It doesn’t make any sense, but of course most of airport security doesn’t.

Next stop was at the airport office to pay the charges. I was presented with an unusually detailed list of items totaling €120. While this is not outrageously expensive, it is definitely on the high side for a landing and one night parking of a 1157 kg aircraft on a not very busy medium-size international airport. Half of it was handling charges that I didn’t expect even though I had read the airport charges document before the flight. On re-reading it could be taken to say that “Basic handling” was compulsory. Oh, well..

Here is yours truly at the fueling station. Our club removes the wheel fairings in the autumn to prevent accumulation of mud and snow. By some oversight they had not yet been put back when I made this flight. Without wheel fairings there is an 8 kt loss in cruise speed.

Fueling was again efficient. AVGAS was €2.70/l, which is a bit steep. Apparently Estonia is not cheap when it comes to aviation.

Tallinn had a large and mostly deserted apron. There was a NOTAM for the balloon at the top of the picture.

On climb-out we passed next to Amari airbase. At the top right, you can just make out the harbour of Paldiski, a submarine base in the Soviet times. It was infamous in the early 80’s because of both confirmed and suspected violations of Swedish inner territorial waters by Soviet submarines.

The weather was very hot – ISA+9°C at FL100, giving a density altitude of about 11000 ft. The service ceiling of the aircraft is 12000 ft so it took a long time to get to cruise altitude with the climb rate down to 250 fpm at the end.

There wasn’t much traffic and the Tallinn Control ATCO was apparently a bit bored. For each aircraft he handed over to adjacent sectors, he invented more and more eloquent goodbyes. By the time I was handed over to Riga, unfortunately another more businesslike controller had taken over the sector. This time there was no problem with communications at the handover point.

Again, there was no flight tracking in Tallinn FIR. The Autorouter tracking picked us up just as we had entered Riga FIR.

The northernmost tip of Gotland (Fårö) against the evening sun. Fårö’s claim to international fame is that director Ingmar Bergman lived there and also several of his films were made there.

Again a visual approach to Visby as #2 with own separation to a preceding airliner.

DAY 4 Visby – Uppsala/Sundbro

We went by back to our house for the night. After my wife had completed her business the final day, it was time to head back home. Again very nice flying weather with no clouds and very good visibility.

The entrance to the grass taxiway in Visby can be difficult to make out if you don’t come straight at it, but fortunately it is well marked.

On take-off from RWY 10 I had the incident that I wrote about in a separate thread. The rest of the flight went smoothly.

Our route followed that of the ferries between Visby and the Stockholm area:

We had a nice view of Stockholm with Bromma and Arlanda airports. Unfortunately, lighting conditions were difficult in haze and we didn’t get any reasonable photos.

As we passed closer than 10 miles to Arlanda, we could observe separation in action. Arlanda SIDs have an initial climb clearance of 5000 ft. On descent we were initially cleared to FL60 while a couple of airliners were told to remain at 5000 as they passed in front of us about 1000 ft below.

We did got a decent shot of my hometown, Uppsala.

And then we were home again. Final to Sundbro (ESKC) runway 21.