My very first IFR-flight!

Today I flew for the first time under IFR and it was a great experience!

The schedule today was to fly from Malmi to Tampere and then stay airborne for a while and do some ILS approaches at Tampere. After that it would be my flight-partners turn to fly a 2-hour local exercise. Then I'd fly a 1-hour basic instrument flight and finally my schoolmate would fly us back to Malmi.

I arrived to Malmi at 7 am and was lucky to get everything ready when at 9 am our instructor arrived. IFR flight planning is a bit different and still doesn't go as smoothly as it will hopefully go in the future, when I've done it more. There's a bit more things to consider than in VFR, like the weather minimums, alternate aerodrome planning and more thorough fuel calculations. However, some things are more simple, like route planning and plotting headings and tracks. You don't really need to know what random neverheard-village is below you :)

We got about ten seconds of IMC-time furing the flight..

We took off from Malmi and got a clearance to initially maintain runway heading (180) and climb to 3000 feet, which after Helsinki Radar vectored us straight over Helsinki-Vantaa to our planned route (RNAV Route P854) and cleared us to FL080. To my slight disappointment, the weather was perfect and I only got to go through a very thin layer of clouds. For the first time in my aviation career, I hoped that the weather would be worse.. There was some broken clouds at 600 feet to be expected at Tampere but of course it was just the remainders of morning fog and disappeared quite fast leaving behind a dull CAVOK message from all nearby weather stations.

Backseat luxury

I realized that it is actually somewhat easier to fly under IFR than under VFR. Not considering all the problems arising from being in actual IMC with some troubles and difficulties, in normal operations it truly is much easier to fly IFR than VFR. You get much better service, someone always tells you exactly what to do, who to contact, what altitude to maintain and what heading to fly, and if not, you just follow the magenta line in the GPS and don't really have to worry about anything. At least until the approach segment starts..

ILS to EFHK RWY 15 whichafter VFR to Malmi

The flight went quite smoothly and so did the approaches at Tampere. We were under radar vectors for the whole time and the workload was low so we even had time to discuss different subjects with the instructor  and my flight-partner. Our instructor is what I consider one of the best in our school since he is a master in creating a relaxed and happy atmosphere and this gives you maximum performance during flight.

All in all, the day was awesome and I very much look forward to flying more IFR-flights!