Life in Lithuania

We run the weirdest syndicate arrangement possible. Our Ikea-coloured Auster Arrow, which was born in Lincolnshire in 1946 and now lives in Lithuania, has three co-owners, but I’m the only one who’s ever seen it in the flesh, let alone flown it. Covid has kept the other two co-owners abroad. For a year now, they’ve only been getting photos of the aeroplane – and invoices for their share of the fees – on our chat group. 

And yet, they are perfectly happy, because such is the magic of vintage aircraft ownership. The moment you take control of an aeroplane that’s older than the Spruce Goose, you realise that you’re now doing a vital job: not merely bimbling, but keeping history alive.

In early 2020, just before Covid struck, I moved to Lithuania for a work contract. Together with two friends – one Brit and one Russian, who both have very close ties to the Baltics – we hatched a plan. We’d buy something quirky and keep it in Lithuania. I’d look after it, and the others would jump on a budget airline whenever they felt like flying it. This was pre-Covid, so we all thought, ‘how hard can it be?’ After all, it only costs a tenner to get from London to Vilnius, and the flight takes under two hours. Much less hassle than driving from central London to, say, Popham.

And so there I was, new to Vilnius and immediately on the lookout for an aeroplane we could share. Lithuania has an unexpectedly vibrant GA scene. It’s a tiny nation (population: a third of London’s, land area: three times the size of Wales), but it boasts something like 50 aerodromes.

At one of them, a friend of a friend of a friend said: “I hear you’re a member of the UK’s famous Tiger Club and like historic aeroplanes? Well, there’s something like a Cub for sale at the Utena airfield, it should be right up your street.”

The ‘something like a Cub’ turned out to be an Auster Arrow, one of only six airworthy Arrows in the world. It had spent most of its life in Germany before moving to the Danish equivalent of Old Warden. The guy who was selling the aircraft – a retired factory director – swapped a pristine pre-war motorbike for it.

He got the Auster dismantled and shipped to Lithuania, and then tasked local mechanics to rebuild it, replacing all the wood, and the metal, and the wiring, and, above all, the fabric. When I turned up to look at it, I thought it looked resplendent in yellow and blue. And it was also impossibly cute. I think all vintage aeroplanes are – as they sit on their tailwheels, they look like puppies begging for a biscuit.

The Auster was just what I wanted. Its 75hp Continental put-put-putted like a wannabe Harley. Its cabin had period features, such as two altimeters, one in metres, the other, in kilometres. It flew straight and true, and, above all, the seller clearly loved it to bits – he knew every single nut and bolt he’d put into it.

Some of these nuts and bolts did look a bit tired – but everything seemed functional, and the price was very reasonable.

And so, we went for it, two UK pilots and one Russian, now members of the Lithuanian GA community. The real learning was about to begin.

Box ticking

First, the country’s CAA. Naturally, I ticked the wrong boxes on its paperwork. With the UK CAA, we all know what such mistakes mean, don’t we? Well, here it’s different. Its deputy head of registrations called me – on my UK mobile, no less! – and talked me through the changes she wanted. And then delivered my new registration certificate by hand.

Then, hangarage. The Auster’s home field, Utena, is a bit out of the way, a 90-minute drive from the capital Vilnius. But it only charges €100 a year. That’s right, a hundred euros a year. This decision, at least, was easy.

And finally, the spannering. I’m mechanically hopeless – I don’t even know how to fit a spark plug. So when the aeroplane threw a magneto in late October, its previous owner recommended we hire a local mechanic. He turned out to be a retired British-trained chap who’d moved to Lithuania and picked up odd jobs whenever he felt bored.

In theory, replacing a magneto should have been simple enough. But Covid and the Baltic winter both got in the way. Between lockdowns and waist-high snowdrifts, the aircraft remained grounded for six months.

Remember all the chat on UK social media about how we all desperately needed to run our engines through lockdown? Well, here nobody bats an eyelid. The country’s GA all goes into hibernation in November. Hangars get locked and forgotten, and the idea of going to an airfield just to turn over a Lycoming is seen as fanciful and, probably, a bit mad. But when spring finally comes, Lithuanian aviators wake up in a way we don’t. They have a tradition here called ‘talka’.

People voluntarily get together for a spring clean of everything in sight. At our airfield, we all swept, washed and painted. We cut the grass. We re-covered the runway markers with new tin stripes. We got rid of old paperwork, magazines and dead batteries. We threw away tea and coffee which had gone off over the winter. We gave a proper burial to a mummified mouse we found in the shed. With the airfield ‘talka-ed’ and the Auster fixed, I was all set to go flying again.

For somebody whose experience comes entirely from British clubs, it’s a weird feeling, to just walk up to the hangar after a winter lay-off, pull the aeroplane out and go. No checkflight, no 28-day rule, no friendly instructor to tell you that you probably won’t crash.

It’s all far more laid back here

The whole country only has four bits of controlled airspace. If you want to land at the capital’s international airport, you simply submit a flight plan and go. Touch-and-goes are free, and a landing costs less than €10.

‘Right-hand orbits at present position, please, you will be cleared for the approach after the Wizzair Airbus on short final’ is something that my UK friends would plaster all over Facebook. Here, it’s a routine occurrence.

Vilnius is Europe’s only capital  you can overfly in a hot air balloon – complete with a zone transit overhead its international airport. Ryanairs will hold for you, because, remember, powered aircraft must give way.

Away from the capital, the south-east where our Auster is based, is Lithuania’s answer to the Lake District. You take off, turn south and immediately find yourself cruising over a glacial landscape, with miles of blue lined by pine forests. The only thing missing are the fells – Lithuania is a very flat country.

And if you turn north, you’ll trundle along for a few hours – especially at Auster’s 60kt cruise speed – but eventually you’ll hit the Curonian Spit, a thin finger of land which juts out into the Baltic Sea. Half of it belongs to Lithuania, the other half to Russia. Right at the border sits Nida Airfield, which is made up of 500m of tarmac, with a challenging approach over the rotor factory that is a seaside pine forest. From landing, it’s a €10 taxi ride to the beach.

And then, there’s Druskininkai, a bumpy strip in the spa town where half of Eastern Europe ‘takes the waters’. Druskininkai sits close to Belarus, and as you tune into Flight Information, you share the frequency with Belarusian MIG pilots on their training sorties.

On air, it’s all a bit crazy and, in a mix of English and Russian, goes like this:

♦ Kaunas Information, LY-XNY, request flight information service.
♦ Lined up for the bomb run, 028!
♦ 28, cleared for the bomb run!
♦ LY-XNY, hello.

I’ve often wondered if it was one of those MIG pilots who forced the Ryanair Boeing to divert to the Belarusian capital Minsk, just so that the arrest could be carried out on one of its passengers, the independent journalist Roman Protasevich?

Right in the middle of the country sits Kaunas, another medieval town, with winding narrow streets, great food, and talented buskers. It has two airfields: Kaunas International (landing fee: €3) and Kaunas Darius and Girenas, a GA field with more than 1,000m of tarmac. 

This airfield is named after Steponas Darius and Stasys Girėnas, two pilots from the 1930s who sit right at the top of Lithuania’s national pantheon. Their portraits, along with a picture of their aeroplane, adorned the national currency before Lithuania switched to the euro. Darius and Girėnas attempted the country’s first transatlantic flight in 1933, but crashed just 400 miles short of Kaunas (the country’s capital at the time).

And then, there is all the gliding. At the vast field in Pociunai, the Lithuanians produce some of Europe’s best soaring machines. The sport is so popular that, as you drive on the country’s A1 motorway, you pass an advertising billboard which has a complete Blanik attached to it.

Visiting any of these fields in an Auster, with its unhurried cruise and two-and-a-half-hour endurance, is ‘proper’ adventure. To me, that’s what makes aviating worthwhile.

Getting from A to B, with autopilot on and IFR filed, is great, but that’s what airlines are for. Low and slow, above beautiful landscapes and with the ever-niggling thought of, ‘will I get there, or will the 1946 engine quit on me?’ is much more fun.

As a group, we’re still deciding what to do with the Auster longer-term. We may bring it home to Britain – but, with Brexit and our newly found freedom from the shackles of EASA (ahem!), that may prove prohibitively expensive.

But keeping it in Lithuania forever is not really an option, either. My contract here will eventually end. And as for my co-owners, I’m not sure that the pre-Covid freedom of movement will ever return to the degree when they’ll be able to just jump on a cheap flight and to go play in the Baltics. We’ll see. For now, the task remains, to properly explore this part of Europe. This 1946 aeroplane is not done adventuring yet…