Railway works, idle hands

AB Svenska Järnvägsverkstäderna had grown into Linköping’s dominant industry building locomotives and rolling stock, but business slumped in the 1920s. The board diversified into boilers and heaters, and in September 1930 decided to set up an aircraft department, ASJA. Its first head was Sven Blomberg, formerly a designer at Svenska Aero. In 1933 it still had fewer than a hundred employees, more than a quarter of them carpenters.

Carpenters and licences

ASJA lived mostly on licences — Tiger Moths, Focke-Wulf Stieglitz trainers, Hawker Harts, Northrop 8A-1 attack bombers and North American NA-16s for the Swedish Air Force — and on designs of its own such as the L1 Viking and Viking II. In 1932 it bought the bankrupt Svenska Aero from Carl Clemens Bücker and delivered seven more Jaktfalken fighters to the air force.

The birth of Saab

In 1937 ASJA and Bofors formed a joint design company, AFF, to chase Sweden’s big rearmament orders. ASJA went around it, submitting its own L10 reconnaissance bomber in 1938, and AFF collapsed. In 1939 a re-formed Svenska Aeroplan AB — Saab — took ASJA over. The L10 became the Saab 17, Sweden’s first all-metal stressed-skin aircraft, and the L11 the Saab 18.

Fabrieken

• Linköping works · Linköping, Östergötland — Became a core Saab plant

Mensen

• Sven Blomberg · first head of ASJA — Formerly a Svenska Aero designer