I spent a day and a half in Helsinki (read about the outbound flight here) before moving on to Stockholm. I tried very hard to like Helsinki, but I couldn’t really find anything remarkable about it… the downtown area is quite small, and to me it just didn’t have the ‘big city’ feel that Copenhagen had had. My hotel, the Scandic Marski, was right on Mannerheiminte (a main shopping street passing through the center of town) so I was able to walk through most of the downtown area, visiting the enormous Stockmann department store and the even bigger Kamppi shopping center.

I was able to try avantouinti, or ice swimming, while I was in Helsinki. It wasn’t actually ice swimming since there wasn’t any ice, but the water was still extremely cold, and I followed it up with a sauna. It was well worth the shock of the cold water – I slept like a baby that night.

The following morning I got up before dawn, packed up and dragged my suitcase over to the Rautatientori, or central railway station, to catch the Finnair bus back to Vantaa Airport.

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Helsinki Vantaa Airport
Sunday, November 26, 2006

After a 35-minute drive through the soggy-looking Helsinki suburbs, we got to Vantaa right as the sun was coming up; the weather was still rainy and murky, so there wasn’t much of a sunrise to see. The bus dropped us off at Terminal 2, which handles mostly Schengen flights and forms the ‘elbow’ between the original Terminal 1 and the smaller domestic terminal:


A view inside Terminal 2 – it’s very modern inside, with check-in desks around the perimeter, although this early in the morning it was pretty dead:


After checking in I still had about an hour before my flight, so I cleared security and spent some time exploring the terminal. There wasn’t much happening out on the airfield, although there were a lot of RON aircraft still parked on the remote stands and at many of the gates. A320s belonging to Air France and Lufthansa were boarding for Paris and Frankfurt respectively, and this Blue1 MD90 was going to Oulu:


One of the ubiquitous Finnair A320s getting ready for a domestic flight:


A few gates down, the E170 I’d be taking to Stockholm had arrived at the gate:


All of the terminals are connected airside, so it’s possible to walk between every gate (except a select few which are used for intercontinental flights and are separated by a passport control.) This is the departure hall of the original terminal:


I stopped off at a snack bar and picked up a sticky bun and cup of coffee for breakfast. The HEL-ARN flight was only scheduled at about 45 minutes, so I wasn’t sure if we’d get anything to eat or drink, but in my haste to catch the bus I hadn’t made time to get breakfast. When I arrived back at our gate, boarding was just starting, so I joined the queue and filed aboard the aircraft.

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Finnair Flight AY635
Helsinki Vantaa (HEL) – Stockholm Arlanda (ARN)
Departs HEL 9:30am, arrives ARN 9:30am
Embraer E170, seat 16A
Flying time: 50 minutes

This was my first flight aboard an E170 and I was eager to check out the little plane. I’d heard really good things about it in other trip reports. I didn’t find the seats to be as comfortable as those on Finnair’s A320, but the legroom was more than adequate. It was also surprising to see how much the plane felt like a regular mainline aircraft. Typically when I hear “Embraer” I think of the little ERJ jungle jets that I’ve flown from Chicago O’Hare so many times, so the spaciousness of the E170 was a nice surprise.

The flight was almost completely full and included a large party of Japanese tourists. As a matter of fact, I saw lots of Japanese visitors during my brief stay in Helsinki – they must like Finland. It’s a pretty short flight for them, I guess. Rain had begun to fall harder as the crew finished up the boarding:


We pushed back about five minutes behind schedule and as we taxied out, the flight attendants conducted the safety briefing, which was read first in Finnish, then in Swedish and in English. The E170 taxied past the terminal, but due to the rain on the window none of my pictures came out.  

We made the lengthy taxi out to runway 4L-22R, Helsinki’s newest runway, which opened a few years ago. It’s spaced far enough apart from 4R-22L to allow simultaneous operations, although traffic seemed slow enough this morning that I wondered why we weren’t assigned the closer runway. Noise abatement, maybe? We seemed to be the only plane moving around on the airfield.

The E170 turned onto 22R and made a nimble takeoff to the southwest, disappearing into the gloom almost immediately after the wheels left the ground. I guess I’ll have to wait for my next visit to see anything of Finland from the air!

Eventually we broke out into the early morning light – I was starting to think that maybe flying is the only time Scandinavians get to the see the sun:


Once we reached our cruising altitude and leveled off, the cabin crew began their service. To my surprise, we received a snack despite the short duration of the flight, followed by a choice of beverage. The snack was almost identical to the one I had the day before – a small ham sandwich, tub of water and candy bar:


We hit some serious turbulence shortly after the meal service – strong enough that the captain came overhead and made a garbled announcement in Finnish, which I assume was telling the crew to sit down (they all sat down right afterward.) The bumps lasted maybe three or four minutes, but once they stopped, I noticed the clouds below us were starting to thin out. A few minutes later, the clouds vanished altogether and I had a beautiful view of the Baltic Sea down below, along with a series of islands off the coast of Sweden:


The flight was very short – basically a quick hop over the Baltic. The crew cleared away our rubbish as the captain announced our descent into Stockholm. We passed over more and more islands and then the Swedish mainland came into view – a rolling blanket of pine forests, broken only by an occasional farmhouse, radio antenna, or completely empty motorway slashing across the landscape:


Although the sunshine was beautiful (I hadn’t seen the sun in about five days), I was seated on the wrong side of the plane, and for the entire descent I had serious glare coming off the window and the wing, so much so that a lot of my pictures didn’t come out, especially during final approach. I wasn’t sure which direction we’d be coming into Arlanda from, but with the sun on my side of the plane I guessed it was from the north or the east. Either way, the approach to Arlanda is basically over open countryside – aside from the odd house or string of power lines, I saw nothing but forests and lakes during final approach:


It was sunny but windy – we were rocking all over the place as we winged lower and lower over the Swedish countryside, finally skimming over some marshland and touching down on Arlanda’s runway 26, rolling basically to the end of the runway before turning off in front of the terminal area. I was sitting on the “good” side of the plane for a view of the terminals, but once again the sun made taking pictures a little difficult. First up was Pier F, where an SAS A330 had just arrived from either Chicago or Newark and two company 737s were resting as well:


Around the corner was the older international Terminal 5, with a Lufthansa A320 and another SAS 737:


A Swiss A320:


Thailand is a big vacation destination for Scandinavians, so Thai 747s visit both Copenhagen and Stockholm:


Next up was Terminal 4, which handles Swedish domestic flights from SAS, FlyNordic and FlyMe:


Finally we passed Terminal 3 (which mostly handles domestic commuter flights) and turned into the fairly modern Terminal 2, which serves European flights from a variety of airlines, although many European airlines also use Terminal 5. Terminal 2 was deserted except for a single FlyNordic MD80:


Pulling into the gate:


The engines wound down, the jetbridge was connected, and one of the ground crew made a fast announcement in Swedish (presumably about which carousel we should claim our luggage from or something.) I filed off the plane and into the antiseptically clean terminal, which was suitably modern – in keeping with the Scandinavian airport trend – heading for baggage claim:


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Once outside the secure area I went down an escalator to the Arlanda Express train, which is frightfully expensive but gets you to Stockholm’s Central Station in about 20 minutes. The trains are extremely modern and comfortable, and once they leave the tunnel under Arlanda Airport they literally step on the throttle, and the Swedish landscape basically flashes by in a picturesque blur for the next 15 minutes, when you slow down to come into the city. We passed through some towns along the way – Upplands Vasby and Sollentuna were the only two signs I could read as we blasted through – but the train doesn’t stop in any of them.

I spent a day and a half in Stockholm – the weather was gorgeous and the city itself is amazing… probably one of my favorite, if not my favorite European city of the ones I’ve visited so far. It’s expensive, but not as pricey as I was led to believe, and it’s small and very walkable. I’ll have some pictures in the final part of my report.

That’s it for now… I’ll cover the last section (a Stockholm-Copenhagen flight with SAS and my return trip to the States with British Airways and American) in the final installment, which I’m still putting together. Stay tuned until then!