My first flight this year!

Lately the weather has been very nice and this had led me to think more and more about going flying again after the long winter pause. Yesterday after school I went flying with my schoolmate sitting as a passenger in the C152 for the first time. We flew from Malmi to Nummela and Kiikala aerodromes and then returned back a while after sunset. I was supposed to go flying myself after this trip but it was getting late and I decided to go home instead and booked a plane for tomorrow.

EFHF at sunset

So today I took the OH-CVP and went flying. My main goal was to fly the compulsory three take-offs and landings in order to be able to carry passengers again so I first spent a few minutes in the traffic circuit whichafter I flew to the Porvoo training area to do some basic flying excersises. I did the usual slow flying, steep turns and stalls and was happy to notice how well everything went despite the couple of months of being in the ground.

It's getting dark..

 After I returned from this flight, I wanted to fly another one so I made all the necessary calculations and preparations and waited a while for the sun to start setting. My goal was to take off at sunset and fly for about an hour before returning and making one touch-and-go landing before coming to a full stop. This was in order to log the compulsory one take-off and landing at night to be able to carry passengers also at night.

Porvoo oil refinery at abut 18.40 local time.

Everything went well and although it wasn't pitch-black when I came to the landing, I logged the last 18 minutes as night time since it had already been over 30 minutes from sunset. In Finland's requlations, night is the time between sunset and sunrise when an unighted obstacle can't be clearly distinguished from 8km distance. As you can imagine, this definition is quite interpretational :)

OH-CVP