As someone based in the UK I have found myself embroiled with the BA Executive Club Avios treadwheel and used quite a few One World partner airlines as a result, but I had never flown Finnair so I decided to rectify that whilst at the same time ticking off another European country. So off to Riga it is.
The Avios reward flights MAN-HEL-RIX were not bookable on the BA site, so I joined the Finnair plus reward scheme, transferred the Avios I needed (36000) and booked on there instead. The process was relatively painless. It wasn't many more Avios to book business class. There isn't any J available on the HEL-RIX leg as that is just a small turboprop plane. And it turns out that arguably there is no J on the MAN-HEL leg either although it is sold as such. There is a direct Ryanair flight MAN-RIX which would be way cheaper, but it's super early in the morning. But this is Flyertalk and I hope I don't need to justify weird choices of air travel routings.

A couple of days before the outbound flight I get informed by Finnair that there will be strike action in HEL on the day I am travelling and that they will be cancelling flights the day before in response. About 60 flights were expected to be cancelled. Since I was travelling out on Friday and back on Sunday I didn't fancy an email the morning of my flight to be told I had been booked on the next day's flight, which would mean I didn't get to see Riga but just go to the airport and hotel and then back again. So I rang up to see if anything could be done pro-actively. After a two hour wait for the online chat they said they could pro-actively book me on any available Finnair flights but not partner airlines, but they might be able to book partner airlines on the day if a rerouting was required. It turns out that the BA routing MAN-LHR-RIX has very similar timings to the MAN-HEL-RIX (The BA routing would have cost almost twice as many Avios to book myself compared to Finnair) so I would have been happy to get transferred to that but I didn't have a lot of confidence of getting through on the phone or chat in time to be able to do it. So I went to bed with fingers crossed that my flights would not be affected.

In the morning it looked like nothing has happened, neither flight is yet cancelled and the HEL airport website isn't showing any cancellations anywhere either. It turns out that the industrial action had virtually no impact on Finnair flights on the day, so that was a lot of stress for no reason in the end.

I walked from home to the train station intending to catch a train to the airport. When I got to the station it was showing on time, then 5 minutes late, then as it was due to arrive the announcement came that it was 40 minutes late. Not wanting to be stressed with a tight arrival time at the airport I decided to get a taxi instead. One more fail for the railways. I think I'm only on about 50% success rate with them so far. If I knew I was going to have to get a taxi I could have flown Ryanair. Still in dispure with the rail company for delay-repay on this, so zero compo so far, I will wring my £9 out of them come hell or high water.