RogerBW's Blog

Finnish Air Force Museum 19 August 2017

Near the Jyväskylä airport at Tikkakoski is the Suomen Ilmavoimamuseo, the museum of the Finnish Air Force. With photographs (all taken on the Lumix GF1): cc-by-sa on everything.

It's based in an old hangar.

Breguet 14 A2, bought after the Finnish Civil War.

Tiira (a private project from the 1970s)

Bristol Blenheim, Mk IV. To be fair to the Finns, they'd been using the blue swastika since 1918; it was the personal good-luck emblem of the Swedish Count Eric von Rosen who gave them their second aircraft. Well, the white circle wasn't - that happened when they painted out the advertisement for the Thulin Air Academy that surrounded it on the Thulin Typ D he'd donated to them.

VL Myrsky II restoration project. Some way to go.

Inside the cockpit of a MiG-21 ("at own risk"). Don't ask me exactly which variant; it wasn't labelled and only the cockpit section was present. It's pretty cramped and I wouldn't have been able to fly one, but comfortable even so.

Saab Draken.

And a detached cockpit section for that too. This one I did fit quite comfortably (clearly Swedish pilots are allowed to be a bit taller).

Various air-to-air weapons.

Soviet-era folding-fin aerial rocket pod.

MiG-21F.

MiG-19.

An array of air-to-air rounds.

Fouga Magister, used for flying and air-to-air gunnery training.

Saab 91D Safir (single-engine trainer).

Folland Gnat.

de Havilland Vampire.

Mil Mi-4.

Mil Mi-1.

Valmet Vihuri II (fighter trainer, used in the 1950s).

A variety of ejection seats.

Instrument flight simulator, bought from Electronic Control Engineering Ltd; didn't really work.

VL Pyörremyrsky: a home-grown fighter for WWII, basically a Bf-109G copy in wood. The war ended before production could start.

And the actual Bf-109G.

A detour into radar and radio systems.

And the obligatory larger bits.

Fokker D.XXI.

Douglas DC-3.

Hurricane Mk I.

Brewster Model 239, post-crash.

Focke-Wulf Fw 44 J Stieglitz.

de Havilland DH.60X Moth, with floats.

Martinsyde F.4 Buzzard, with skis.

An array of engines.

Gourdou-Leseurre B.3.

Couldn't find a label for this one, but I'm pretty sure it's an Ilyushin Il-28, probably the reconnaissance variant.

Air-to-air missiles for the Draken.

Moving outside, more aircraft: another Mi-4.

And a MiG-19 in unique colour scheme.

Two-seater Draken. (Maybe some sort of infra-red gear on top of the canopy?)

MiG-21bis.

Anonymous anti-aircraft gun.

MiG-21UM.

Another Folland Gnat.

And finally on the other side of the car park a whole bunch of unlabelled air-search and missile-guidance radars.

I'd definitely recommend this museum if you're any sort of aviation enthusiast; I could have done with more labelling in English, but hey, it's their country not mine.


  1. Posted by Ashley R Pollard at 03:45pm on 19 August 2017

    Surprising amount of Soviet gear. DO you know if bought or captured?

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 07:31pm on 19 August 2017

    Anything post-WWII is bought. They tried to spread purchases between Western, Eastern and local producers; the fast jets were a mix of MiG-21s and Drakens until about 1990, then they moved to F/A-18C/Ds.

  3. Posted by John Dallman at 11:58am on 20 August 2017

    The Finnish Air Force had significant restrictions on their equipment under their peace treaty with the Soviets at the end of WWII. The Finns abrogated that treaty in 1990, but until then they had an unusual relationship with the USSR, not being a member of the Soviet bloc, but not being a normal Western/Scandinavian country either.

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