The Swedish Air Force

The Swedish Air Force 

The Swedish Air Force or as they were called before, The Royal Swedish Air Force. Is a part of the Swedish Armed Forces, they are specialized in solving  air related missions by attacking enemies at sea, land or air. Their secondary task is to seek and collect intel. We use hunting-, attack- and reconnaissance aircrafts for this task. 

In the Swedish air force today, three airbases and one helicopter base is in use. The air force also has support from the FMV (Swedish armed forces material production) from which they purchase aircrafts especially from the company in Linköping known as SAAB.  

History  

The Swedish air force officially started up in the 1920’s, but already in the 1910’s the aircrafts participated within the Royal Army. In 1912, the first military flight was flown from Lilla Värtans outside Stockholm. In the beginning the air force belonged to the Royal Navy and that’s why the first flight school was intended to be located by Vaxholm. In 1913 the development of the air force took off by moving to Malmens airport just outside of Linköping. From going just “reconing” to also attack and bomb targets.  

After a defense-decision in 1925 the independency of the Swedish Air Force started up. Which resulted in them being cut loose from the royal navy.  

SAAB’s JAS 39 Gryphon and other aircrafts 

The Swedish Air Force’s beauty in the air, JAS! JAS isn’t the real name for the aircraft. The real name in English is hunt, attack, recon 39 Gryphon or in Swedish: Jakt, Attack, Spaning 39 Gripen. In production it is called SAAB 39 Gryphon. The Gryphon has five different variants today, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta and the newly released Echo which has so much classified graded mechanics that civilians won’t even get to know what the wings are made of.  

The Swedish company SAAB have for many years been a good main source for the Swedish Air Force and they have built almost every aircraft since the 1940’s. That makes the air force of Sweden very effective because we don’t need to ship the aircrafts. SAAB is also giving The Armed Forces some sort of discounts because of them being big customers. 

Other planes that have been produced by SAAB is the school-plane SK60 or its production name, SAAB 105. They also created the old fighter-jet for the air force, SAAB 37 Viggen. The SK60 is not the first plane a future pilot will fly, but it is the one where they will get to know their limits, everything from shooting rockets to discovering new G-forces with a plane that can fly up to 890km/h. SAAB 37 Viggen though is not in use anymore, it is a very good plane indeed and some technicians also think that it’s even better then it’s replacer, JAS 39 Gryphon.  

How do the Swedish Air Force transport goods then you may ask? Like many other countries, they use the Lockheed C-130 Hercules with a loading capacity of 19,9 tons. It’s 40,4m wide and 29,8m long. That huge piece of aircraft is very active at this day because of the foreign operations the Swedish army have in Mali, where they need much supplies to even survive in the warm parts of Africa.  

Airforce isn’t just Aircrafts 

The Swedish Air Force isn’t just aircrafts and missiles. It’s a lot more than that, it’s even more  work beside the aircrafts then it is working on them. Here we come in to the communication and logistics parts about the air force.  

Communication are the people who communicate via different radios and people to get a well-balanced and good working flight as well as missions in the air force. It’s everything from air control tower, to the people guiding the aircrafts out to the start-off area.  

Logistics, it’s almost everything in the air force and it’s covering approximately 70% of the employees in the air force. The logisticians are working on cleaning the fields, aircrafts, weapons and even wheels. Refilling ammunition to aircrafts, fuel, barracks, weapons and even to hydrate and water the plants. Everything is done and written down by them, without them the air force is nothing. 

Milton Pechmann SAF, secondary editor and writer at the Swedish Armed Forces editorial office.

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