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Last weekend I took a short trip to Latvia and Estonia to grab the last chances of flying on some old propellor planes. It all started with a long lasting wish to fly on a Saab 340 ever since seeing them on KLC lines back in the 90's
Ov is one of the few airlines in Europe using the SF340 and therefore the first booking (TLL- RIX) was a fact. To get into the baltics in a cheap way I flew Ryanair to Riga on sunday morning.
To connect the dots I booked a Fokker 50 flight from the capital of Latvia to that of Estonia.
The Fokker 50 was my first and only flight in 1994, flying to Bremen on a 'dagvluchtje'
After booking these flight I got hold of a rather interesting and cheap option to fill some time in Estonia. Avies Airlines is a small regional based airline in Tallinn with several flights tot Sweden, Finland and Kardla, which is a village on the Estonian Island of Hiiullmaa. Since they use old Jetstream 31/32's and the fares were extremely low I decided to take a returnflight to Kardla, just for the fun of it. So there you have it : NRN-RIX-TLL-KDL-TLL-RIX-NRN in a matter of 36 hours.
On our way to Riga just after the scratchcards are promoted.
Arriving in Latvia we had 3 hours to spend and decided to go to the aviation 'museum' right next to the terminal:
Here's some military stuff I'm not really interested in but maybe someone on this forum is:
A friendly staffmember was so kind to open up the stored AN-24 so that we could get a glimpse of the cockpit:
A short walk to the general aviation apron resulted in this nice spanish bizzjet
Back at the airport:
Riga is an airport which is heavily dominated by Air Baltic; traffic is rather slow but views from within the terminal are pretty good.
A Dash on it's way to some european destination
Time for our flight to TLL; YL-BAR is scheduled for today's flight. BT is phasing out their F-50 in a rapid way...so hurry if you're interested in flying one. SOme of them are ex- KLC by the way.
Quite an old cabin
Quite a bumpy ride out of of RIX..
Somewhere over Estonia
Tallinn Airport is even smaller, somewhere around 4 flights per hour depending on the time of day..
Finncomm about to push itself back for the flight to Helsinki.
After a few hours of sightseeing in the city center we went back to the airport for the Jetstream flight on Avies.
I was quite surprised to find a dutch registration on this Jetstream 32
Fantastic experience...only 3 other passengers on this flight
On final for Kardla
The huge departure hall at the airport
The whole airport timetable
After 20 minutes boarding the flight back to TLL
Back in TLL we drove past a Saab which was parked for the night.
The next day we stood up early to catch the 8 o´clock OV flight to RIX. I was quite disappointed that there was an aircraft change because of maintenance on one of their Saab´s.
It ended up being a boring ATR 42 of Danish Air Transport so I didn´t bother making pictures on that flight...
Hope you enjoyed this trip report!
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