On 1 July 2026, fifty-four aircraft and helicopters went over Stockholm Castle in formation, from JAS 39 Gripens to warbirds older than most of the people watching. Sweden’s air force had turned a hundred.

It is a strange centenary to write about, because for most of that century the Flygvapnet was built for a war it intended never to fight, by a country that refused to join anyone. Then, two years ago, Sweden joined NATO.

The Flying Baron got there first

The air force is a hundred. Swedish military flying is older. In 1912 Baron Carl Cederström set up a flying school on the military exercise ground at Malmen, outside Linköping. He was known as Flygbaronen, the Flying Baron, and had become the first Swede to hold a pilot’s certificate two years before that.

What happened in 1926 was administrative rather than aeronautical, and none the less important for it.

Pulling army and navy flying into one service was the decision that made everything afterwards possible. An independent air arm gets its own budget line, its own doctrine and, crucially for Sweden, its own relationship with industry.

A small country that insisted on building its own

This is the part that makes the Flygvapnet unusual. Sweden has never had more than about ten million people, and it spent the century designing and building its own combat aircraft anyway.

The Saab B 17 first flew in 1940 and became the company’s first aircraft to reach series production, serving as both bomber and reconnaissance machine. After it came a run of fighters that had no business existing in a country that size: the barrel-shaped J 29 Tunnan, the double-delta Saab 35 Draken, the canard Saab 37 Viggen, y el JAS 39 Gripen that flies today.

The reason was strategic rather than sentimental. A neutral country cannot rely on anyone selling it aircraft in a crisis, and a country with Sweden’s geography cannot rely on its airfields surviving one. So the aircraft were designed to operate from dispersed road bases, to be turned round by conscripts with hand tools, and to work in weather that would keep other air forces on the ground.

The Malmen centenary airshow, with Gripen and Viggen alongside visiting Eurofighters and Rafales.

230,000 people and a free ticket

The centenary itself was celebrated with a seriousness that says something about how Swedes feel about this. Malmen, still an operational base and home to the Armed Forces’ Helicopter Wing, opened to the public for two full days in August with nearly eight hours of flying each day.

An estimated 145,000 people came on the Saturday and 85,000 on the Sunday, roughly 230,000 across the weekend. Admission was free, which is why the crowd had to be estimated partly from aerial photographs. The programme ran under the theme “Past–Present–Future”.

Among the aircraft flying was Saab B 17A serial 17239, Blå Johan, the only airworthy example of the type left in the world, operated by the Swedish Air Force Historical Flight. Sweden does not merely keep its old aeroplanes. It keeps them flying.

The centenary flypast over Stockholm on 1 July 2026.

From neutrality to the northern flank

For most of its hundred years the Flygvapnet was built around a single assumption: nobody is coming to help. That produced the dispersed basing, the domestic industry, the obsession with short fields and quick turnarounds, and a Cold War air force that was, at moments, among the largest in Europe.

Sweden joined NATO in 2024, and the assumption inverted. The same aircraft, the same roads, the same ability to disappear from a main base now belong to an alliance that is extremely interested in exactly those skills, because nobody else in NATO has kept them up to the same standard.

A hundred years of preparing to fight alone turns out to have been excellent preparation for fighting alongside everyone else. That is not how the planners of 1926 would have put it. It is, however, the most useful thing the Flygvapnet takes into its second century.

Highlights from the two Malmen centenary days.

Sources: Vintage Aviation News, Försvarsmakten (Swedish Armed Forces), aeroTELEGRAPH, European Airshows, Militär Aktuell.