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.
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