Military aviation in Sweden starts at Malmen. Baron Carl Cederström, born in Södertälje on 5 March 1867, trained at the Blériot school in 1910 and became, in Wikipedia’s wording, the 74th pilot in the world and the first to receive a certificate in Sweden. The press called him the flying baron, and he spent the next two years touring Sweden with exhibition flights before turning to instruction.

In 1912 he opened a flying school on the open fields at Malmen, just west of Linköping near Malmslätt, with four military pupils. It was a private venture that met the army’s need, and in 1913 Cederström left and the army took over the facilities. From then on Malmen was a military airfield, and the English-language entry on the base still dates its opening to Cederström and 1912.

Cederström did not live to see the independent Air Force. He was killed on 29 June 1918 when his aircraft came down at sea, which Wikipedia places in the Gulf of Bothnia, together with Carl Gustaf Krokstedt. The Swedish Air Force Museum now tells the story of these pioneers in its exhibition Flygfärdig, which follows military flying from the pioneers to the arrival of the jet.

When the army and navy air arms were merged into Flygvapnet on 1 July 1926, Malmen became the home of the Östergöta Wing, F 3. For its first two decades it was a reconnaissance wing, flying a succession of S-designated types from the S 1 to the S 22 until 1948, when the Air Force began to turn it into a fighter wing.

The jets came in steps: de Havilland Vampires as the J 28A from 1950, Saab J 29A Tunnans from 1953, J 35D Drakens from 1965 and J 35Fs from 1970. The wing’s flying squadrons stood down in 1973 and the administration followed in 1974, after 48 years at Malmen. The airfield itself stayed open, passing first to the Bråvalla Wing, F 13, and later to the Uppland Wing, F 16, as a detachment.

Those detachments kept specialist work at Malmen. An SHK report of 1993 records a J 32 E, the electronic-warfare Lansen, of F 13/M, the Malmen detachment, and notes that the unit had since become F 16/FKM. The Defence Materiel Administration’s flight test organisation also flew from here: in August 1979 one of its S 35 E reconnaissance Drakens was lost just north of the field. The type details for F 3 come from Wikipedia and were not re-checked against a primary source in this run.

On 1 January 1998 Sweden merged the helicopters of the army, navy and air force into a single unit, the Armed Forces Helicopter Wing, with its headquarters at Malmen. Wikipedia, citing the unit, says Sweden was the first country in the world to organise its helicopters this way. On 1 January 2003 the wing became part of the Air Force’s organisation while staying operationally independent.

The Armed Forces’ own page calls it the only helicopter unit in the Swedish Armed Forces. It carries out rescue operations, transport and reconnaissance for the army, navy and air force, at sea and on land, at home and abroad, day and night, and in a crisis supports civil society. Examples it gives include winch rescues, searches for missing people, firefighting, casualty transport in Afghanistan and anti-piracy reconnaissance in the Gulf of Aden.

The wing flies from Linköping, Luleå and Ronneby, with its main site at Malmen, whose aerodrome it also runs according to the AIP. Wikipedia places the 2nd and 4th Helicopter Squadrons and a special helicopter group at Malmen with the Hkp 15 (AW109) and Hkp 16 (UH-60M Black Hawk); those numbers are not confirmed on the official site. Among its commanders was Micael Bydén, in 2008–2009, who went on to lead the Air Force and, from 2015 to 2024, the Armed Forces.

Basic military pilot training has been at Malmen since 2003, when Wikipedia records the flying school moving in with its Saab Sk 60 jet trainers. SHK’s reports call it the LSS flying school in Linköping, part of the Air Combat School. Before that the Sk 60 had trained pilots at F 5, the Krigsflygskolan, whose loss of an Sk 60 in May 1992 is also on SHK’s list.

The Sk 60 served for 57 years, from July 1967 until its official retirement on 18 June 2024. Its replacement was bought on 5 May 2021, when FMV signed with Grob Aircraft for a complete basic trainer system based at Malmen: the Grob 120TP, called the Sk 40, with simulators, computer-based training, safety equipment and maintenance. Advanced training moved to the Gripen.

The first three Sk 40s landed at Malmen on 3 April 2023. Ten were ordered at first; on 17 October 2024 FMV ordered three more for greater robustness in availability, taking the fleet to 13. Introduction was not smooth: Wikipedia reports that work-environment problems caused by a high workload put the new aircraft’s introduction on hold for a time. The final Sk 60 air-combat training cycle ended in spring 2024.

Not everything at Malmen is a helicopter or a trainer. The Skaraborg Wing, F 7, leads all transport and special flying in the Armed Forces and keeps personnel and aircraft for radar surveillance, signals intelligence and state flights in Linköping and at Bromma/Arlanda. Its page lists the TP 100 (Saab 340) and TP 102 (Gulfstream) for personnel transport, the S 102B Gulfstream for signals-intelligence missions and the S 100D for radar surveillance and control.

Wikipedia gives the Malmen unit as the 74th Special Air Squadron; that number is not on the official page. The S 100D entry needs care: the air-force dataset records a government announcement of 29 May 2024 that the two ASC 890 (S 100D) aircraft would go to Ukraine, while the F 7 page still describes S 100D missions. This page therefore does not state whether any S 100D is still at Malmen.

The S 102B’s work has a direct ancestor in the museum next door. The DC-3 shot down in 1952 was on the same kind of mission, signals intelligence over the Baltic, with three Air Force crew and five civilian operators from the FRA signals-intelligence agency aboard. Seventy years on, the Air Force still flies that mission from Malmen and Arlanda, now in a Gulfstream business jet rather than a slow wartime transport, and the museum case that holds the DC-3 wreck stands on the edge of the base.

The Swedish Air Force Museum, Flygvapenmuseum, was established in 1984 beside the base at Malmslätt. A second hall followed in 1989 and the museum was rebuilt around themes in 2010; it was named Swedish Museum of the Year in 2011. Its collection spans 1910 to the present, including what Wikipedia calls the only surviving Junkers Ju 86. On 1 July 2026, the Air Force’s hundredth birthday, it opened EFFEKT, an exhibition on a century of engines that runs until the end of 2029.

Its best-known exhibition, Hemliga handlingar, is about the DC-3 that vanished. On 13 June 1952 the Tp 79, serial 79001 and nicknamed Hugin, took off from Bromma on a top-secret signals-intelligence flight and was shot down over the Baltic by Soviet MiG-15s; all eight aboard died. One cockpit clock stopped at 11:28:40. Three days later a Catalina searching for it was also shot down; its crew were rescued.

The wreck was found on 10 June 2003 by Anders Jallai and Carl Douglas, raised on 19 March 2004 and displayed in a purpose-built case in the museum basement from 13 May 2009, with the crew’s wallets, shoes and keys. Four of the eight have been identified by DNA. A few kilometres east, Saab builds and flight-tests the Gripen at its own airfield, Linköping City (ESSL), where the first prototype crashed on 2 February 1989; that is Saab’s field, not Malmen.