Am doing a 'Santa' flight (B757) into Ivalo soon, which is way off my familiar turf to the Mediterranean.

Any Finnish (or other) troops out there who can give me a heads up on any 'bear traps' up there?

Company briefing material is just the Jeppensen plates and that's it!

Thanks in advance.

Can't give you much information. I was there 14 years ago on a goldmining flight with som exec. from Holland. Worst thing - nobody speeks english.

We were there for 4 days. Great salmon fishing, beautiful girls -however we hit two reindear with our car - that cost you a lot of money to the locals - they own all of them!!!

Good luck - its very dark up there

Thanks Scandinavian.

I will think long and hard about the girls, but the trouble is, I probably will not even be leaving my aircraft, that is, if I can get my First Officer to do the walk round!

Hopefully the reindeers will have been cleared from the runway.

Language is no problem either- I live in central London, and not many people speak English here either!!

Thanks again.

Random Electron


You will find that most Finns do speak english and many even quite well. It would be older generations that are less fluent english, but speak German , French in addition to swedish. It is not uncommon for a finn to speak 5 or more languages in addition to the native language.


Hope you enjoy your trip. Ramp in Ivalo might be a bit crowded this time of the year, but you can expect pretty smooth sailing as things generally work well in Finland.

Merry Christmas and happy new year 2004, Hyvaa Joulua ja onnellista uutta vuotta 2004.

JJ

Thanks JJflyer,

I'm looking forward to Ivalo, and I'm sure that the Finns, like all other nationalities, speak better English than we lazy lot here in the UK do!