Jimisola.com - keepin’ on

I was gladly surprised this Friday when I found out that some new albums were out! I am not a fall or winter kinda guy - I need my heat and sun - but one of the best parts with this part of the year are definitely the new albums releases…

• Jagged Edge released Baby Makin’ Project. They’re back with So So Def and Jermaine Dupri. The albums has only 11 songs and contains love songs - no uptempos. It’s a trip down memory lane to their earliest albums. Can’t wait for a few uptempo/part remixes though

• Rahsaan Patterson’s Wine & Spirits is the album to follow-up on 2004’s After Hours.

Where do I start?! The trip up north was simply amazing!

As I written before we arrived Sunday afternoon and had hoped that we’d be flying on Monday, but the weather was not good enough. At least not prior to noon, since the visibility was poor, it was snowing(!) and the temperature below freezing point. Went from 15 to -5 °C just like that.

Day 1:

So, Monday was spent getting familiar with Vilhelmina and during the evening we planned Tuesday flight. The mission with the whole tour (at least for most students) is to make it to Kebnekaise, Sweden’s highest mountain. So, we planned a route from Vilhelmina, via Hemavan (it’s located approx 20km north-west of Tärnaby which is to hometown of famous Ingemar Stenmark, Anja Pärson and Stig Strand), Sarek National Park, Kebnekaise and Kiruna. On our way back we had planned to fly from Kiruna via Gällivare, Jokkmokk, Vidsel and Storuman.

Day 2:

Early morning we took of towards Hemavan. We flew at 3500ft MSL due to low clouds from Vilhelmina heading north towards Hemavan. We flew below clouds in the wide river valleys and it was a thrill with the scenery. We made it up passed Tärnaby and where we knew that the University flight (with Ulf and Espen) had turned around since it was not possible to pass Hemavan due to a wall of clouds. They, however, had never planned to make a TGL at Hemavan which me and Johan had. So we continued, made the TGL and flew back. On the company frequency we discussed whether we should go back to Vilhelmina or reroute to Storuman (which is further east and where we knew we had better weather). We agreed on flying to Storuman and plan for the rest of the day from there. It was a smooth ride down as we followed a river. As we were closing in we were informed by Sweden Control that a Skyways (Fokker 50) flight from Vilhelmina was inbound as well. We managed to get a peak at the Fokker on final - even if it was from a far… We had a short break at Storuman where we decided to continue to Luleå (on the East Coast) for lunch and then head back home to Vilhelmina via Skellefteå. After we came back to Vilhelmina we waited in the tower for the last Cirrus to join in as the two coast guards, Karin aka Kajsa and Calle, had to stay in Stockholm for an extra day to due bad weather (especially gusty sidewinds up to 25kt at Bromma).

Day 3:

The forecasts had looked promising and we once again aimed for Hemavan. We did the same route as we had planned initially for our first day only this time we made it! I know that I commented on the scenery earlier, but I’m gonna do it again. It was amazing to pass Sarek National Park and circle at 8000ft around Kebnekaise before we continued to Kiruna. This day we had far better weather! We flew at FL80 almost the whole way and it was especially interesting to do the same route in better conditions. It was a good experience to see how different it can be. It was quite cool (to be honest) to have three Cirrus do the same route!

Day 4:

Once again we expected bad weather heading home as stationary cold front was coming in from the south-west. Therefore, we had decided to try to fly out early morning. Our main concern was that we would have a lot of frost on the airplanes (we were delayed for 1,5 hour the day before). Luckily, the guys at Hemavan airport were kind enough to let our Cirruses in in their hangar to speed up things. All three airplanes departed within 10 minutes. The first leg - which I flew - was from Vilhelmina to Örebro and estimated time enroute was approx 3h. flying that one. I knew that it would be three loooong hours since 1) we did not have a working autopilot in our airplane and 2) the whole leg had a track of 189° (M). However, after approx half the leg as we were getting closer to Borlänge/Falun we had to descend to 1500ft MSL to stay below a broken cloud layer as our school doesn’t allow us to fly on-top. Clouds layers are divided into how well the cover the sky. The measure octas is used, i.e. how many eight of the sky that is covered. Few/FEW is 1-2, scattered/SCT is 3-4, broken 5-7 and overcast/OVC 8.

Anyway, flew below the clouds and had to do some low-level navigation to make our way south due to hills etc. Johan did an excellent job with the map while I concentrated on flying and I feel that we worked really well together. It was definitely the most challenging flight that I have flown so far. We had to use rivers, valleys etc to stay clear of hills etc. At times we flew 600-700ft AGL to stay clear of clouds, but I never felt unsecure or that we “pushed the limits”. It was simply a good experience and it was especially good since we were two in the airplane. There was actually another University airplane (with the coastguards) trailing just 3-6nm behind and we stayed in contact throughout the flight.

We finally ended up in Örebro only to find out that the weather southbound was not airworthy. We were stuck, everyone was tired and just wanted to get “home” to Ljungbyhed. After a 2-3 hour wait the school decided to pick us up with the PA31 that had been with us in Vilhelmina (it was flown by two flight instructors) and let the Cirrus SR20 airplanes stay in Örebro to be picked up be the other group in our class on their way up to Vilhelmina two days later. The PA31 ride home was very interesting. It was an experience to study the flight instructors trying to pick up on some procedures etc. The weather was quite bad when we got to Ljungbyhed with a cloud ceiling of 900-1100ft and sidewind around 20kt!

Some pictures from the three last days…

SE-LUC and SE-LUD at Storuman

Scenery 101 - somewhere between Skellefteå and Vilhelmina

Kiruna mine I

Scenery 101 - Lake up high

Scenery 101 - Kebnekaise II

Beautiful morning scenary overlooking Volgsjön from our cabin

And off we flew! Friday morning me and my class mate, Johan Sjösholm, departed from Ljungbyhed for Visby, Gotland. Johan flew the first leg and everything went smooth. It was a thrill to fly at 6500ft overlooking Öland, Gotland and, at moments, nothing but ocean. We had a quick turn-around, but still managed to get a decent lunch. We had hoped to spend a little more time in Visby, but there was bad weather, polar front, coming in from the west.

I had the 2nd leg of the day - Visby to Stockholm/Bromma. The expected low clouds came as we got closer to the coast (south of Stockholm) . Had to fly at 1200ft to stay clear of clouds on our way in towards Bromma. The visibility was good, so we still got see a lot of Stockholm from above! The approach route to Bromma is a bit tricky since it’s situated in Stockholm. It was a good experience.

Friday evening and Saturday was spent in Stockholm hanging out with friends and, of course, the mandatory visit(s) to East…

Today, Sunday, we flew out north from Bromma towards TEB (Täby) and HMR (Hammar) and then followed the coast to Umeå via Hudiksvall and Sundsvall/Härnösand. It was planned to take approx 3h, but the wind information was not correct so we fly it in 2h20m

After a quick stop in Umeå, we continued west towards Vilhelmina. We got to get a glance of the mountainous terrain that is yet to come. It was really cool to arrive at Vilhelmina on a 12nm long final. Tomorrow’s forecast does not look to promising, but we are hoping to be able to some cross-country up north on Tuesday at least.

Check out my Norrland tour photo album for pictures.

Norrland

Bromma Approach I

ESSB (Stockholm/Bromma) threshold runway 12

Pilot Laursen - believe it or not

The last two weeks have been crazy. Practical exam for the Private Pilot License two weeks ago (got a notice today that my certificate is a the post office :)),

This week we have the real ATPL (Airline Transport Pilot) theory exams, i.e. for the Civial Aviation Authority. I passed Human Performance & Limitations and Meteorology today and have Air Law and General Navigation coming up on Thursday (hence, 2 out of 11 exams are out of the way!).

The two latter subjects, ALW and GEN NAV, are the ones that I’m most worried about. Air Law does not have a lot of logic. Why is it 3nm from the threshold and not 5nm? It’s basically “just” to memorize a lot of stuff. General Navigation is divided in a “theory” part and a calculus part. It ain’t really hard - not like the math course I took at the university a looooong time ago - high school math works great. But, it is a quite long test and you’re under constant time pressure, so it is easy to do basic mistakes.

Anyway, Friday we’re finally off for our “Norrlandstur”. It’s basically a tour up to the northern part of Sweden. The idea is for us to get some experience of flying in mountainous terrain etc - the southern part of Sweden has very low terrain and lots of fields. There are six students in my group and we will be two in each plane. “My” plane plans to first fly to Visby (Visby is situated on Gotland - which is an island east of Sweden, between Sweden and the Baltic countries) on our way to Stockholm where we will stay for a couple of night before we continue north.

It’s going to be a lot of fun! I’ll definitely have my camera with me, so hang around for some pictures…

I’ve released a new version of Freshy-JL - my Freshy WordPress theme mod.

You can download it from here.

I would like to thank the people who took the step to upgrade to WP 2.2 prior to me and documented the problems with Freshy. I’ve made three changes; two to functions.php and one to sidebar.php.

Please let me know if you experience any problems.

I just made some upgrades to the site. WordPress was upgraded to the lastest version (2.2.2) as well as most WordPress plugins. I’ve checked most things, but it could be that I missed something and I would appreciate if you then let me know (use the contact form).

When next week’s four theory exams are over I’ll try to get it back online as well releasing a new version of my Freshy Mod which now works with WP 2.2.2.

Update #1: I’ve upgrade Gallery2 (the photo album program) to the latest version as well.

Update #2: The latest version of WPG2 contains a bug that does not allow for individual pages and/or posts to be viewed, so I have had to temporarily deactivate it. This means that no pictures will be shown in the posts for the time being. They will show when I reactivate the plugin though. And all pictures are still available on here (or use menu to right).