A railway works learns to fly

In 1936 Sweden’s prime minister, Per Albin Hansson, admitted something awkward in public: the country had good shipyards and armouries, but no production at all for warplanes. Europe was rearming, and neutral Sweden could not rely on buying abroad — a large order for American Seversky P-35 fighters could not be delivered in full. The answer was to build at home. Strangely, the heart of what became Saab began in a railway works. AB Svenska Järnvägsverkstäderna, the Swedish Railway Workshops of Linköping, had opened an aircraft department, ASJA, in 1930. In its early years more than a quarter of its workshop staff were carpenters, because aircraft were still largely built of wood.

Born on 2 April 1937

Saab itself was founded on 2 April 1937 as Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, by the armaments firm Bofors together with AB Ars of the Electrolux group, with Marcus Wallenberg, Axel Wenner-Gren and Sven Wingquist among its founders. Its base was the old Nohab aero-engine works at Trollhättan. On paper Saab and ASJA were meant to cooperate through a joint company, AB Förenade Flygverkstäder; in practice they competed, and ASJA kept winning the air force contracts. When ASJA’s design office produced the winning proposals that became the Saab 17 and Saab 18, the joint venture collapsed. In 1939 Saab bought ASJA and moved its head office to Linköping. As Saab’s own history concedes, it was really ASJA that took over the Saab name.

The Barrel, the Lance and the Kite

War forced invention. The first Saab-designed aircraft, the Saab 17 dive bomber, flew on 18 May 1940. The Saab 21 fighter of 1943 put its engine behind the pilot, driving a pusher propeller — so Bofors developed an ejection seat to keep the pilot clear of the blades, and the type is often cited as the first to enter service with a modern ejection seat. After the war came jets with character. The rotund Saab 29, nicknamed Tunnan, the Barrel, flew in 1948 as Western Europe’s first post-war swept-wing fighter and set a world 500-kilometre closed-circuit speed record of 977 km/h in 1954. The Lansen slipped past Mach 1 in a shallow dive in 1953, and in 1955 the double-delta Draken took to the air.

The duck that locked on to the Blackbird

The Draken, built by a team under engineer Erik Bratt, could fall into a deep superstall at high angles of attack, so its pilots were trained to recover from it — training that led to the manoeuvre now known as the cobra. Bratt’s team followed it with the Viggen, first flown on 8 February 1967: the first canard aircraft produced in quantity, fitted with a thrust reverser so it could operate from strips only 500 metres long, including roads, under Sweden’s dispersed Bas 60 basing system. By the mid-1980s Viggen pilots, fed with ground radar data, had repeatedly locked their radars on to American SR-71 Blackbirds flying routine routes over the Baltic. No other aircraft has an acknowledged radar lock on the SR-71.

The aircraft maker that built cars

Saab also did the unexpected. After the war Swedish buyers faced years-long waiting lists for cars, so the aircraft company built one: the Ursaab prototype became the Saab 92, in full production from 12 December 1949. Computers followed. Datasaab grew partly out of the need for a navigation computer small enough to fit in an aircraft, and its CK 37 flew in the Viggen from 1971. In 1969 Saab merged with the lorry maker Scania-Vabis to form Saab-Scania, inside the Wallenberg family’s group of companies. The empire then unwound in stages: General Motors bought 51 per cent of the car business in 1990 and the rest a decade later, Investor AB split Saab and Scania apart again in 1995, and Saab Automobile went bankrupt in 2011.

Gripen: two crashes and a comeback

The Gripen was meant to be Saab’s triumph. The first one was rolled out on 26 April 1987, the company’s 50th anniversary, and test pilot Stig Holmström flew it on 9 December 1988. Then things went wrong in public. On 2 February 1989 the prototype crashed while landing at Linköping, filmed by a television crew; test pilot Lars Rådeström walked away with a broken elbow. On 8 August 1993 Rådeström lost control of a production Gripen during a low roll over the Stockholm Water Festival, with tens of thousands watching, and ejected; the jet came down on the island of Långholmen. Both accidents were traced to flight-control software and pilot-induced oscillation, fixed by 1995. The Gripen entered service in 1996 and has since been exported on four continents.

From fighters to submarines

Today Saab is far more than an aircraft maker. Buying Celsius in 2000 brought in Bofors’ missile business; in 2006 Saab became sole owner of Ericsson Microwave Systems and its Erieye radar; in 2014 it bought the Kockums submarine builder, whose Karlskrona naval yard dates back to Sweden’s age as a great power. Saab builds the GlobalEye surveillance aircraft on a Bombardier business-jet airframe, makes the aft section of the Boeing–Saab T-7 Red Hawk trainer for the US Air Force, and sells the Carl-Gustaf and NLAW anti-tank weapons. In 2025 it reported revenue of SEK 79.1 billion and about 26,100 employees — and the Wallenberg family is still its largest owner, almost nine decades after Marcus Wallenberg helped found it.

Fabrieken

• Linköping works · Linköping, Östergötland — Former ASJA plant and Saab’s design and aircraft production centre since 1939; a 20,000 m² underground workshop opened in 1945
• Trollhättan works · Trollhättan, Västergötland — Former Nohab aero-engine factory and Saab’s first home in 1937; later the base of Saab cars
• Karlskrona shipyard (Saab Kockums) · Karlskrona, Blekinge — Naval yard acquired with Kockums in 2014; builds submarines and surface ships
• Gripen E production in Brazil · Brazil — Local Gripen production began in 2020
• T-7 aft-section plant · West Lafayette, Indiana, USA — Announced in 2019 in Purdue University’s Discovery Park District
• UK radar production site · Fareham, Hampshire, UK — Opened in 2023

Mensen

• Marcus Wallenberg Jr. · co-founder, financier — Among the founders in 1937; his family still controls Saab
• Axel Wenner-Gren · co-founder, Electrolux industrialist
• Sven Wingquist · co-founder, industrialist
• Erland Uggla · managing director of ASJ — Set up the ASJA aircraft department in 1930
• Sven Blomberg · head of ASJA — Former Svenska Aero designer of the Jaktfalken fighter
• Lars Brising · engineer — Led the design team behind the Saab 29 Tunnan
• Erik Bratt · engineer, later director — Responsible for the Draken and Viggen; at Saab 1945–1981
• Anders J. Andersson · aircraft designer — Designed the Saab 91 Safir
• Lars Rådeström · test pilot — Survived both the 1989 and 1993 Gripen crashes
• Micael Johansson · president and CEO

Records en primeurs

• Saab 21: often cited as the first aircraft to enter service with a modern ejection seat
• Saab 29 Tunnan: first Western European swept-wing fighter produced after the Second World War
• World speed record over a 500 km closed circuit, 977 km/h, Saab 29, 1954; 900.6 km/h over 1,000 km by two S 29Cs, 1955
• Saab 32 Lansen exceeded Mach 1 in a shallow dive on 25 October 1953
• Saab 37 Viggen: first canard aircraft produced in quantity and first with an airborne digital central computer using integrated circuits
• Viggen: the only aircraft with an acknowledged radar lock on the SR-71 Blackbird
• Saab 29: first Swedish jet aircraft to see combat, with the UN in Congo, 1961–1962
• Saab chief test pilot Marcus Wandt flew to the International Space Station in 2024