AFIS Aerodrome

Today we flew an interesting school flight to an AFIS aerodrome, Kajaani EFKI. An AFIS aerodrome is an airport, which is kind of in between a controlled aerodrome and an uncontrolled one. It has no ATC but flight information service instead. You need a flight plan to be able to enter the airspace but the controller doesn't give you any clearances, only suggestions. This leads to interesting radiocommunication that isn't always so easy and requires some practise if not used to.

The journey begins. Malmi Airport from above.

So, if you normally say "Information Alfa, QNH 1013, request taxi", in an AFIS aerodrome you would say "Information Alfa, QNH 1013, will taxi to holding point Bravo". When the ATC normally says "cleared to land" in an AFIS aerodrome all that you'll hear is "runway free". So you receive information but every decision is ultimately up to you. You don't have an obligation to, for example, use the runway the AFIS controller suggests to you.

Turning to final at Mikkeli.

We flew this flight with a C172 so that the first leg was to Kajaani via Mikkeli airport and I was sitting in the backseat as an observer while my schoolmate was flying. At Kajaani we swapped seats and I flew the plane back home via Jyväskylä. So in total I spent almost six hours in a C172 :)

FL075

The other objective of this flight was to navigate at higher altitudes, so we flew the leg to Kajaani at flight level 75 and back to Malmi at flight level 85. We used the GPS system to help in high altitude navigation and learned a lot about its features.

Approaching Kajaani. It was a bit rainy below the clouds.

Overall, it was very nice to fly at high altitude on top of the clouds since it's so stable up there and you get to concentrate on other things than keeping the plane straight. Although our C172 doesn't have an autopilot, I now acknowledge its benefits since steering by hand at these altitudes is really just correcting the heading by a degree or two or correcting a 20 feet altitude change and so on. Very easy but boring and gets quite tiring after a long leg.
It was also nice to get to learn all the AFIS procedures. From now on, we can start flying solo flights to these airports. Looking forward to it :)