Olli Vainio Photography

Early June Aeroflot did some training flights with these soon to be delivered MD-11’s within Finland. They also visited Oulu.

I also updated Oulu Airport 2008 -gallery with some more recent photos.

Indeed, the Russian Knights. As I said earlier, they performed at the Midnight Sun Airshow 2008.

Many said that they were dissapointed to the Russian Knights’ display, but I really can’t agree here. Sure the display isn’t visually as spectacular as some teams like Red Arrows, but flying big and heavy jets makes it very different kind of show. While it wasn’t really awesome I’d say that it was at least “good”. The solo of Su-27 was really good, if not spectacular.

And while on the subject of Midnight Sun Airshow, the Midnight Hawks were really awesome. Display smokes do make a big difference. Period. Also FiAF Hornet’s solo was good as usual.

Anyway, the gallery from Midnight Sun Airshow 2008 is now online.

On May 5th, I visited Helsinki-Vantaa’s air traffic control facilities, a visit organized by SVIL.

We were given a short presentation about how air traffic control works at Helsinki-Vantaa. After the presentation we first visited the radar control room and then in the control tower.

Views from the radar control room. The current Eurocat radar system has been in use since 2000 and is planned to have an update in the near future.

Some additional tools used by air traffic controllers. From the top: ground radar, maestro(system used to calculate traffic flows) and WODA (displays current weather, ATIS and runway usage etc.)

Views from the control tower. Actual tower positions are at lower level and upper level has the ground and clearance delivery positions.

I also couldn’t help my self to take few photos of aircraft when offered such a good vantage point.

And lastly, a view towards the non-schengen terminal Finnair’s heavy birds waiting to depart to Mumbai, Bangkok and Beijing. As you can see there’s huge construction going on.