Ilmatar Airplane Lodge - Sleeping In A Saab 340B With A Sauna Built Into The Fuselage

There's a hill in the middle of Finnish farmland where, if you weren't told otherwise, you'd assume a plane had crash-landed. It hasn't. A decommissioned Saab 340B passenger aircraft sits there deliberately, wingless, fitted out with beds, a sauna, and a working set of cockpit controls you're actually allowed to touch. It's called Ilmatar Airplane Lodge, and it's the only accommodation of its kind in Finland.

The whole property - plane, control tower villa, and granary room combined - is rented to one group at a time, sleeping up to ten people. Nobody else is on site. No shared corridors, no other guests wandering through. Just you, the people you brought, and a 35-seat aircraft that used to fly between cities and now just sits still, looking out over the fields.

Location

Ilmatar sits in Uurainen, a small municipality in Central Finland known more for lakes and forest trails than for aviation oddities. Getting there means renting a car - this isn't a place you stumble on by public transit. Jyväskylä, the nearest city, is 39 kilometers (24 miles) away, and Jyväskylä Airport is a 28-kilometer (17-mile) drive. If you're coming from further afield, Helsinki is 306 kilometers (190 miles) south, and Helsinki-Vantaa Airport sits at 300 kilometers (186 miles).

Central Finland is a region that rewards slowing down. It has four national parks, thousands of lakes, and a reputation - only half a joke locally - as the Land of Saunas. Uurainen is unremarkable in the best way: quiet, rural, the sort of place where a converted airplane on a hilltop counts as the biggest thing to happen in years.

It Started With "Should We Buy A Plane?"

The lodge exists because of a group chat message. In the fall of 2022, one of five friends from Uurainen spotted a Saab 340B up for auction online and asked the others whether they should buy it. The plane had been damaged beyond repair in a landing accident at Savonlinna Airport in January 2019, and after sitting there for years, it was finally being sold off.

They won the auction, went over budget doing it, and only afterward drove to Savonlinna to actually look at what they'd bought. What followed was a strange logistics job: a crane and an aircraft mechanic team detached the 22-meter (72-foot) wing section from the fuselage, and the whole thing was loaded onto special transport trucks for the drive to Uurainen, arriving in November 2022.

Construction started properly in 2023 - permits and planning first, then the actual dismantling and rebuild of the interior, alongside a new villa built next to the plane, designed to resemble an air traffic control tower.

The lodge opened to guests at Midsummer in June 2024. All five founders had backgrounds in property development and real estate, which probably explains how a plane on a hill became a functioning, bookable hotel rather than a permanently stalled side project.

The Saab 340B Aircraft

The Saab 340B has its own history before it ever got to Finland. It first flew in January 1991 out of Saab's factory in Linköping, and over more than three decades it worked for a string of airlines - Crossair, Carpatair, South Airlines, and finally RAF-Avia, under whom it suffered the landing accident that ended its flying days.

Now grounded for good, the fuselage has been completely gutted and rebuilt inside. The layout keeps a sense of what it used to be: there's a section with table seating using the original airplane seats, plus a sofa bed in the cabin.

The Cabin and Captain's Suite

The cockpit has been turned into the Captain's Suite, a room for two people built right into the nose of the plane. You sleep with a direct view out through the original cockpit windows - and the control yokes have been left in place in front of the glass, so you're looking out past actual flight instruments rather than a curtain or a headboard. It's a strange thing to wake up to.

Back in the main cabin, the convertible sofa bed sleeps two more, positioned in what used to be passenger seating. Between the cockpit and the cabin, the plane alone accommodates four people, with the rest of the property - the granary room and the two bedrooms in the control tower villa - making up the remaining six.

The Sauna

Perhaps the strangest detail on the whole property: there's a sauna built into the tail section of the fuselage, heated electrically, tucked into what used to be the plane's rear baggage compartment. It's a small, unlikely space to find a löyly in, and it's the detail most people bring up when they talk about the place afterward.

For a more traditional experience, the control tower villa has a second sauna, wood-heated in the classic Finnish style, which opens out onto an outdoor jacuzzi. Between the two - one wedged into an airplane, one built the old-fashioned way - Ilmatar covers both ends of the sauna spectrum in a single stay.