The double-delta fused two wings into one: an inner delta swept at roughly 80°, optimised for high speed and packed with fuel, engine and landing gear, blended into an outer delta of about 60° that preserved lift and control at lower speeds. That let a single airframe combine a very high top speed with acceptable take-off and landing behaviour — a hard trick in the mid-1950s. At high angle of attack the sharp leading edges shed energetic vortices that add lift, an effect later exploited deliberately on the F-16, F/A-18 and Rafale. Saab discovered much of it the careful way, first on the half-scale Saab 210 testbed, before committing the real aircraft.

Power came from a single Volvo Flygmotor RM6C — a licence-built Rolls-Royce Avon 300 fitted with a Swedish-designed afterburner (the EBK 66/67). It delivered roughly 56 kN dry and about 78 kN in reheat, enough to push the Draken past Mach 2. Sweden’s decision to license and then locally develop the Avon — rather than import a finished engine — was part of the same self-reliant, non-aligned logic that shaped the whole aircraft.

The same wing that let the Draken perform its kort parad also made low-speed handling demanding on the early marks: mishandled, the jet could enter an uncommanded superstall that required deliberate, trained recovery. Swedish pilots learned to treat the high-alpha regime as both a weapon and a hazard. It is frequently cited as the first aircraft able to perform a cobra-type manoeuvre — but contemporaneously it was flown as a carefully managed combat and recovery technique, not an airshow flourish.

The Draken was a Swedish state product built for the national air force, never sold on an open dollar market, so a firm flyaway unit price and a credible cost-per-flight-hour simply do not exist in the public record. Surplus airframes later changed hands privately for figures in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that reflects a decommissioned 1960s jet’s scrap-and-collector value, not what it cost Sweden to build or operate. Any precise dollar figure attached to a Draken should be read as an estimate.