Arrival

As with the previous years' Nordplus courses, first it was up to the participants to gather at the host location.

This year's host location was Nuuk, Greenland. Nuuk is the capital and largest town in Greenland, with about 15 000 inhabitants out of the total population of 55 000. It is unofficially known as Godthåb ("Good Hope") in Danish.

It was a long flight from Finland. To arrive at Nuuk by noon, we had to get up... a bit early.

First we flew from Helsinki to Copenhagen. There, we switched to an Air Greenland flight to Kangerlussuaq. This picture was taken while waiting for the flight.

Kangerlussuaq is the only airport in Greenland capable of handling large airliners, so it is usually the first destination for international flights. It is located at the west coast of Greenland.

Several hours later. En route, crossing the east coast of Greenland.

Approaching the west coast. I will let the scenery speak for itself.

		About fact boxes
	There is some didactic and other factual content on the later pages of this report, placed in fact boxes like this. In order to further confuse the diligent reader, this is not meant to imply that the rest of the report is fiction.

After a while, we arrived at Kangerlussuaq and met some of the other participants of the course. The sunshine was warm, so we went to a waiting area outside.

Here is a sign in the outside waiting area. As we can see, Greenland is about halfway between selected destinations at Europe and North America. Geographically, Greenland is closer to America, and also geologically part of the North American continent, but this does not show on the sign, as there are no destinations from Canada listed. (The partially obscured entry reads "Rome 5hrs. 40min." All others are visible in the picture.)

The last leg of the journey was a domestic flight from Kangerlussuaq to Nuuk.

As most of the airports in Greenland are small, and cannot handle large airliners, a majority of the equipment in use by Air Greenland consists of propeller planes (source: inflight magazine Suluk, but Wikipedia has this information available online).

Indeed, this flight was aboard a "Dash 7", i.e. a de Havilland Canada DHC-7, one of which is pictured to the left.

It is a predecessor of the "Dash 8" model that had a headline-grabbing series of landing gear accidents this autumn. It however seems the earlier model is more reliable of the two; the last ones were produced in 1988, and there are fewer reported incidents for the DHC-7 when compared to the DHC-8 (according to the Aviation Safety Network).