No Thermal Winter

Yesterday on the news here in Finland: for the first time since weather statistics have been collected (so in almost 200 years) the very south of Finland (including Helsinki) did not experience a thermal winter! This is defined as a period of at least 5 days with an average temperature below 0 degree Celsius.
Perhaps that serves as one explanation for the period of silence here on this blog. Other reasons include ground suck and illness. But in recent weeks several friends have been active flying both here and abroad.

Hapa guided a group of pilots to the sunny slopes of the Mont Blanc in Chamonix back in February. The picture above is by Jussi. More pictures (by Haukka) can be found here.

Several of the usual suspects have been making the uttermost of the few instants of flyable weather at the popular ridges at Junkkari, Porlammi, Hango and Suomenlinna. The not-so-steady winds resulted in quite some "tree-points". Finland is lucky to have lots of forest, but most flying sites have a few trees too many. Some pilots manage to do something about that....


Meanwhile I'm busy making plans for the summer, it is going to be full of interesting flying events. I plan to participate in round 1 of the British Open in Spain in early June. The next foreign event is the Nordic Open in Macedonia at the end of July. And at the end of August I'm going to help with a fun flying festival in Gréolières, in France, possibly taking a group of Finnish pilots along. In between those we of course expect many long beautiful flying days here in Finland; the days are clearly getting longer now. Everybody is hoping for a repeat of last year's spring, when we had epic flights in May.