When war broke out in 1939 the Swedish Air Force had a single fighter wing, F 8 near Stockholm. On 28 February 1940 the Riksdag decided to add two: F 9 at Gothenburg and F 10 in Skåne. The Göta name had first been approved in 1938 for a wing at Såtenäs; when that became the Skaraborg Wing, F 7, the name passed to the new Gothenburg wing, whose task was to defend the west-coast harbours.

The sources disagree on when the wing was born. The Swedish Wikipedia article and the Gotland defence-history society give 1 July 1940; the English article, citing Braunstein’s standard reference work, gives 1 October 1940. One may mark establishment and the other commissioning, but no primary source we read settles it, so this page publishes both dates rather than choosing one.

Säve on the island of Hisingen was not ready. While the airfield and buildings were under construction, part of the depot staff was quartered in central Gothenburg and most of the new wing was sent from 10 July 1940 to the Bunge field at Fårösund on Gotland. Its two squadrons of J 8 Gloster Gladiator biplanes were run as training squadrons, and the first students arrived that July; one squadron had just received the new American Seversky fighters, the J 9. English Wikipedia dates the move to Säve to 16 June 1941.

Säve is the best-known example of a Swedish idea: put the aircraft inside the granite. English Wikipedia says the Air Force began its first underground hangar at F 9 in 1941 and commissioned it in 1944; the Swedish article says it was ready in 1942, making F 9 the first Swedish wing with one. Shelters were probably in use before the hangar was finished. A second followed at F 18, south of Stockholm, in 1947.

This first hangar became known as Gamla berget, the Old Mountain. In the jet era it held a company of J 29F Tunnans and one of J 34 Hunters. After the war the Air Force planned underground hangars at every base with suitable rock, but the plans proved too costly and were cut back. The next generation was designed against tactical nuclear weapons: the hangars had to sit under 25 to 30 metres of rock behind heavy concrete blast doors.

At Säve that meant Nya berget, the New Mountain, opened by King Gustaf VI Adolf on 15 May 1955. Aeroseum, which now occupies it, says it lies close to 30 metres underground and forms a complex of 22,000 square metres beneath 70,000 square metres of land. English Wikipedia gives 22,000 square metres for all the base’s underground space, grown from 8,000. Nya berget held a J 34 company and five to seven Sk 16 Harvard trainers.

The hangars were secret. Gothenburg’s tourist board calls the site “a top-secret defence installation” during the Cold War. They outlived the wing: after 1969 Nya berget became a store for surplus J 35 Drakens, and the Swedish Wikipedia article says the rock hangars left the war organisation only in 2000. A widely repeated claim that the site stayed classified until 1998 could not be confirmed from a source we could read, so we do not give a date for the end of secrecy.

F 9’s aircraft trace the Air Force’s wartime and early jet story. It began in 1940 with J 8 Gladiator biplanes, plus J 9 Seversky monoplanes that first summer. Fiat CR.42s, the J 11, followed until 1943, when F 9 received the Swedish-built FFVS J 22, designed in a hurry after the United States stopped arms exports to Sweden; production deliveries to F 9 began in October 1943.

In 1946 the wing moved to the Saab J 21, the twin-boom pusher fighter that was among the first operational aircraft anywhere with an ejection seat. The jet age came in 1949 with the J 28B, the de Havilland Vampire bought from Britain. From 1951 (English Wikipedia) or 1952 (Swedish Wikipedia) F 9 flew the J 29 Tunnan, Saab’s barrel-shaped swept-wing jet, for more than a decade; the J 29F with afterburner was the version in the Old Mountain.

The last type was the J 34, the Hawker Hunter Mk 50. Sweden signed for 120 on 29 June 1954 and gave them first to the Stockholm wings, F 8 and F 18. When those wings changed role or took the J 35 Draken in the 1960s, the Hunters moved to F 9 and F 10. The sources give 1961 or 1962 for F 9; conversion was complete on 1 March 1963. The last J 34 left Swedish service in 1969.

The Draken never became an F 9 aircraft. Swedish Wikipedia records that the J 35B was planned for the wing but not delivered. Drakens came to Säve only after the wing had gone, parked as surplus inside Nya berget, and they are there today as museum exhibits. Between 1961 and 1962 F 9 also passed on its Tunnan know-how: with F 15 at Söderhamn, it trained Austrian pilots and technicians from 6 July 1961 for the 30 J 29Fs that Austria bought.

Sweden stayed out of the alliances of the Cold War but prepared to fight alone, and its planners assumed that an attacker would try to destroy the Air Force on the ground in the first hours. The answer had two halves. One was to go underground, as at Säve, where the rock hangars were meant to keep a wing’s fighters alive through air raids and, from the 1950s, near misses by nuclear weapons.

The other half was dispersal. Under Bas 60 in the 1950s and Bas 90 from the 1970s and 1980s, squadrons of eight to twelve aircraft would leave their peacetime wing for wartime bases spread over 20 to 40 square kilometres, each with a 2,000 to 2,300-metre main runway, road strips, scattered hardstands and, under Bas 90, 800-metre short strips. Conscript ground crews rearmed aircraft in the open. About 20 bases had reached the Bas 90 standard when the programme was halted in the mid-1990s.

The two ideas shaped each other. Rock hangars were costly, so they were built at only a few bases, while dispersal could be spread across the whole country. Säve kept a place in the scheme after the wing closed: the 1968 government view was that F 9 should go but the airfield should remain as a wartime air base (krigsflygbas), and the hangars stayed in the war organisation until 2000.

Neutrality had a hidden side. In 1994 the Neutrality Policy Commission, chaired by Gösta Gunnarsson, reported that from the 1950s Sweden had lengthened east-coast runways to take damaged Western bombers, linked its air-defence centres to Denmark and Norway by radio relay, and in the early 1960s set up a secure telex line to US Air Forces in Europe. None of this is documented for F 9 itself.

By the mid-1960s the rising cost of advanced weapon systems was forcing the Air Force to shrink. Government bill 1968:110, signed at Stockholm Palace on 8 March 1968 with Defence Minister Sven Andersson as the responsible minister, set out the arithmetic. After cuts of about 15 per cent in 1967, the fighter squadrons would fall by more than 35 per cent, and the Air Force would have to close three or four wings in one budget alternative and two or three in the other.

F 9 was one of them. The Swedish Wikipedia article records that the government wanted F 9 wound up while keeping Säve as a wartime air base. The wing ran down one squadron at a time. The 93rd Fighter Squadron (“Ivar Gul”) was left unmanned from 30 June 1967, the 92nd (“Ivar Blå”) was disbanded on 30 June 1968, and the 91st (“Ivar Röd”) on 31 December 1968.

The wing stood down at 15:00 on 30 June 1969. At a farewell ceremony on Gustaf Adolfs torg in Gothenburg on 25 June, Colonel Ulf Cappelen-Smith handed the colour to Lieutenant General Norén. The wing’s air-defence sector, run since 1957 from Mölndal, passed to F 7 on 1 July. Only three years earlier, on 8 May 1966, its anniversary air show had drawn 40,000 spectators.

The military did not leave at once. The navy’s 2nd Helicopter Squadron (2. helikopterdivisionen) moved into part of the wing area from Torslanda, and for more than 30 years flew Hkp 4 Vertol 107 heavy helicopters from Säve on anti-submarine and rescue work. The 2004 defence decision cut the number of helicopter bases; the Armed Forces finally left the old wing area, and Aeroseum dates the end of “a more than 30-year era at Säve” to 28 April 2006.

The western part of the airfield became a civil airport from 1976. As Gothenburg City Airport from 2001 it was a Ryanair base and peaked at 863,140 passengers in 2013, but runway damage by heavy aircraft ended scheduled flights on 18 January 2015. The operator says Säve closed to general aviation on 1 January 2026; only rescue, ambulance and police helicopters remain, on a runway the AIP gives as 1,085 metres.

Nya berget found a new life as Aeroseum, a hands-on aviation museum owned through Gothenburg’s city property office. Its plan was drawn up in 1999, and since 1 January 2008 it has belonged to the Swedish Military Historical Heritage network under the National Swedish Museums of Military History. Visitors see a Draken, a Viggen, trainers and helicopters from the Alouette II to the Super Puma. Former crews recreated the 2nd Helicopter Squadron inside the museum, and in 2018 its Hkp 4 “Y70” flew again.