Flying to Copenhagen and Kuusamo

The past two weekendends I've been away a bit more than usually. Two weeks ago I got a chance to fly to Copenhagen in order to travel to southern Sweden from there and then drive my sisters car all the way back to Finland. It was a nice trip and I finally got a chance to listen to lots of music by myself while driving. There's nothing better than a long drive and a handful of Anjunabeats- and Future Sound of Egypt -trance music collections!

The weekend after that I flew to Kuusamo with my father for some skiing. It was very nice, although the temperature was about -30 degrees! Here's some flying-related pictures I took:

Our ride home from Kuusamo was the A319. This time I didn't even try to gain a jumpseat position, since I wanted to accompany my father for the duration of the flight. Takeoff sure was quick and with lots of flex power, since it was so cold.

A little anti-icing before takeoff. If I recall correctly, this was my first time I was a passenger on a flight, which needed to go through the remote before takeoff.

My first time in the business class. Food seems to reflect modern times. A few slices of roast beef and cold spaghetti...

...but at least the champagne was free of charge! :>

The final year begins!

Here we are again! Today was our first day of school this year and it started with five hours of Air Law studying. This year is going to be the final one and my estimated graduation, if all goes well, will be sometime in the autumn, whichafter I will probably very soon find myself from a flight instructor course.

Lately we've been studying some extremely complex mathematical formulas, that only an airline pilot can master. This includes triangles, squares, rectangles, arrows and circles :)

So, for now the ATPL theories continue and we are yet quite far from the finish line. There's still weeks until the first eight exams and after that we still have six more subjects to go through. Then it's time to start the required 35-hour simulator training for the instrument rating, after which we'll get to fly the Piper again. I'm looking forward to that!

Something about the current situation:

Just before Christmas, Flybe Finland announced that from now on new pilots will have to pay for their type rating on the ATR-42/72 in order to land the job. I've heard rumours that other things will also have to be paid by the employee in the future. This came as a complete surprise to many people and what makes it even more strange is that we just had the employment seminar a while ago and of course this was not mentioned at all. So, things are not looking so good at the moment! We'll have to see how all this turns out. My guess is that this will lead to a pilot shortage in the future, but it's too far away to affect my generation of pilots-in-training.