The Saab 35 Draken: The Groundbreaking Fighter Nobody Talks About

Introduction

It was among the most record-breaking fighter aircraft ever built, a singularity of cutting-edge, jet-age design and an absolutely badass range of capabilities. Built by Sweden in the early years of the Cold War, the Saab 35 Draken, or, in English, the Dragon, rewrote the rules on what a fighter aircraft could be, and when it thundered into the sky, it immediately became one of the few warbirds that Soviet Russia ever truly feared.

On today’s episode of Megaprojects, we’ll be taking a close look at the Draken: the unique mission responsibilities it had to undertake, the stunning capabilities it could add to its pilot’s toolkit, and the long, long list of records it shattered during decades upon decades leading the pack.

Design and Development

In the years immediately following World War II, the victorious powers of the world felt as if they might be able to take a breather. Although the Americans and the Europeans could see Soviet leader Josef Stalin giving them side-eye from his throne in Moscow, they knew that Stalin was just as battered and bruised as they were, and with politicians and generals alike feeling entirely fatigued with war…well, just for a moment, they took their foot off the gas when it came to aircraft development. As the world stumbled into the Jet Age, aircraft like the Vampire and the Meteor in Britain and the Shooting Star and the Thunderjet in America seemed as if they might just be enough to hold over the trans-Atlantic powers until the next wave of military buildup began.

But over in Sweden, the ruling Social Democratic Party and the Swedish people had no such luxury. With a population of barely seven million, a strict policy of neutrality with either the emerging NATO bloc or the Soviet Union, and a whole lot of strategically significant territory, Sweden understood acutely that it was going to be in the crossfire if NATO and the Soviets ever started trading blows. During these years, Sweden’s government understood acutely that their policy of neutrality would see them steamrolled in a third World War, but then again, the entire word would be steamrolled anyhow by a massive nuclear exchange.

Much more important, from Sweden’s perspective, was that it would be able to defend itself during such a cataclysmic war, and ensure that its people at least survived a first, crippling nuclear exchange. And in an age when bomber aircraft were still the primary means of delivering nuclear payloads, that could only mean one thing: Sweden needed an interceptor aircraft.

Now, unlike, say, the British, whose lack of foresight on the Cold War left them stuck with the Hawker Hunter, or the Americans, who could throw together a whole series of fighter aircraft in no time at all, the Swedes understood that they were both racing against a ticking clock, and at a material disadvantage in terms of how much they could produce, and how fast they could produce it. So all the way back in 1949, even before the Americans and the Soviets had tested MiG-15 and F-86 aircraft against each other at scale in Korea, Sweden was already laying the groundwork to procure an interceptor aircraft that would put both the Americans and the Soviets to shame.

The Swedish Air Force was highly specific in what they were looking to acquire, in order to fit the unique wartime environment that Sweden would have to operate in. Of course, Sweden had the list of the speed and combat requirements you’d expect, and a forward-looking version at that. Their new fighter jet would have to hit a top speed well above the speed of sound, roughly Mach 1.4 to 1.5, an expectation that would be revised upward multiple times before the plane was ultimately produced. It would also have to be capable of performing an interceptor role at roughly the speed of sound, with the expectation that it could deal with heavy bombers and their fighter accompaniment in time to prevent them from flying over Sweden’s long, but narrow stretch of territory. But the plane also came with some more particular requirements. It would have to be able to fly in all weather conditions, day or night, including in the intense winter cold of Sweden’s northern reaches. They would have to be a single-pilot aircraft that could, nonetheless, destroy heavy bombers without a dedicated gunner or navigator, and they’d have to be able to operate out of rough airstrips, including even reinforced public roads that were expected to serve as part of Swedish airbases in times of war. Finally, they had to be really, really easy to replenish between flights, to the point that a team of military conscripts with basically no training could have them refueled and rearmed with ten minutes or less from landing to takeoff.

The specifications were for a fighter meant for a single, absolute defense of Swedish territory, an all-out, breakneck effort to defend Sweden’s airspace before the entire nation was destroyed along with the rest of the world. By Sweden’s own expectations, its fighters would never have to see a foreign war; Sweden had no need, no desire, and no ability to project power abroad. Instead, their cutting-edge aircraft would be a massive investment strictly for national defense—and it would be an aircraft that, in a best-case scenario, never saw combat. If it did, then the world was most likely in the process of being destroyed.

The aircraft would be built by the Saab corporation, who planned it to enter service when two fighters they had in development, the stubby Saab 29 Tunnan and the Saab 32 Lansen night fighter, would have already been introduced, lived out their service lives, and become obsolete. That time allowance would end up being particularly important for the team at Saab, who had to explore a wide range of new technologies that were either badly underdeveloped, or didn’t exist at all when the aircraft was in its early design phases. A team of five hundred or more technicians would work on the new Saab fighter by the time all was said and done, but one engineer led the pack: Erik Bratt.

Bratt’s approach to the new fighter was a highly creative one, and both he and the Swedish government were willing to take significant engineering risks and experiment with the limits of the available technology, in hopes that they could seize on advantages that less bold aerospace designers might have left on the table. Chief among them was the new plane’s so-called “double delta” design. Looking at the eventual Draken design from the top down, it essentially uses two wing shapes at once: a pair of very narrow wings that run along nearly the entire aircraft body at an eighty-degree sweep, and a pair of wide, stubby wings toward the back of the aircraft that formed a much more traditional, sixty-degree triangular sweep.

Those two wing shapes were basically fused together into one, in a first-of-its-kind design choice that offered two major benefits. First, the double delta gave the wings a significantly higher storage volume for fuel, and second, the double-delta design was much stronger in a structural sense, meaning that the aircraft would be able to resist damage, buffeting external winds, and strain of maneuvering in a dogfight better than a comparable aircraft of traditional wing design. The design’s major sacrifice—specifically, its drag in midair—would also eventually confer an advantage onto the Draken, but we’ll get to that later.

The first aircraft to come out of the Draken program wasn’t a full-size aircraft, but instead the Lilldraken, which is both Swedish for “Little Dragon”, and a fantastic SoundCloud rapper name, if any of our viewers at home would like to use it. It was a prototype of about seventy percent scale, meant to try and figure out whether a double-delta wing would be able to fly competently at low speed. High speed was much less of an issue; anything with wings and decent proportions will stay airborne pretty well when it’s blasting across at Mach one-and-a-half.

The Lilldraken made its maiden flight in January of 1952, and after an intense several months of flight testing, it was modified to have its air intakes pushed back to the position they’d end up in on the eventual Draken aircraft: starting directly alongside the cockpit, in order to give the pilot far better vision when looking down toward the ground. In an age before computer programs or flight simulators, it was the Lilldraken that confirmed that a full-size Draken was worth building.

And build it, they would, with a trio of full-size prototypes. The first of the three took its maiden flight in the autumn of 1955, and the second, flying a bit later, unintentionally took the Draken past the sound barrier for the first time. In its maiden flight, the plane’s afterburners had proven so powerful that they blasted it through the sound barrier even as it was climbing into the sky.

The plane was ordered for production, its testing crews pushed it further and further, and in January of 1960, it reached Mach 2 for the first time. By then, the first Draken aircraft had already been delivered to the Swedish Air Force, and a few months later, they’d prove their worth in a series of exercises that were just as intense as the testing process had been. Over three days and nights, the first round of Drakens and their pilots flew the aircraft practically constantly, proving they could scramble to intercept an incoming target again and again, get back into the sky rapidly, and maintain complete readiness continually.

By the end of the year, the aircraft had been delivered to multiple fighter wings, and the Draken fleet was finally in business.

Specs and Capabilities

When discussing the J 35 Draken, we’re going to run through the specs of the first-line model, the J 35A. As will become clear in just a moment, there have been a lot of variants and export versions of the Draken, and for us to attempt to go through all of them would keep us here for quite a while. But rest assured that each subsequent variant after the J 35A offered its own improvements over the top of the baseline model.

But even that baseline model, when it first entered service in 1960, was something to behold. A one-seater aircraft powered by a single Rolls Royce Avon Mk.48A engine, and fitted out with a Swedish afterburner, the Draken measured an overall length of 15.2 meters, about 50 feet, with a wingspan of 9.42 meters, or 31 feet. When sitting empty, it weight just above 6,500 kilograms, roughly seven and a quarter tons.

It wasn’t designed to be able to carry a whole lot of heavy bombs; instead, it was meant to carry a whole lot of internal fuel, a total of 2,240 liters, or 590 US gallons, giving it an impressively long range for such a high-powered fighter aircraft, even without any drop tanks. It could hit a maximum speed of 1,900 kilometers per hour, 1,200 miles per hour, and it needed less than a kilometer of runway to take off, as few as 810 meters or 2,660 feet. It could fly as high as 20 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, 66,000 feet, with a neck-breaking climb rate of nearly 40,000 feet, 12 kilometers, per minute.

In terms of its weaponry, it came equipped with two fixed 30mm cannons in the wings, with each gun equipped to fire ninety rounds. Externally, the plane was fitted with nine hardpoints, including eight under-wing and one under the belly. Of those nine, six wing hardpoints were meant to hold high-explosive air-to-ground rockets to fill an attack role—say, if Soviet tanks were rolling across Sweden en masse. The other two wing hardpoints were meant to hold Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, which entered service in the US four years before the Draken did in Sweden. On the belly, the Draken could mount either two more Sidewinders or a drop tank for fuel. Because of the limited amount of space under the wings, Drakens could either carry under-wing missiles or rockets, not both, meaning that these fighters could be configured for either an interceptor role—that is, with two to four Sidewinder missiles onboard, plus their guns—or, for an attack role, with their rockets and perhaps two under-belly Sidewinders for protection. The plane was equipped with French-made radar, and an advanced gyro gunsight that used the aircraft’s own data to help aim the plane’s cannons more accurately.

But as impressive as the J 35A’s numbers were, especially at that time…that was still just the base version. Ninety 35As were produced for Sweden, with the last one being delivered in December 1961. The next round, the 35B, would see some of its copies modified into a day fighter, with its radar removed but the hardpoints armed to the teeth with offensive weaponry.

Most 35Bs would instead be an all-weather fighter, featuring a Swedish-made radar, a radar gunsight, and a full avionics suite. The 35B day fighters would eventually be modified into the same successor version. These were the first Swedish planes ever to receive digital orders from the ground to the aircraft, using computers that could store the data for pilot access rather than making the pilot memorize anything.

The 35C featured a rebuild of the front section of the aircraft to make it more flyable, and a second seat in order to let it work as a trainer version, while the 35D featured greatly improved engines that raised the top speed from 1,900 to 2,150 kilometers per hour. It also got a second underbelly hardpoint, allowing it to fly even farther missions than the previous Draken iterations. The 35E was built as a reconnaissance version, featuring a total of nine cameras in the nose and fuselage, and a setup to mount up to four drop tanks or an infrared reconnaissance pod.

Finally the 35F version cranked up the speed even more, all the way to Mach 2; that’s nearly 1,500 miles per hour, or 2,400 kilometers per hour. It also featured new missiles, new avionics, and just one cannon rather than two. Subsequent designs for a ground-attack Draken were ultimately never built.

Regardless of the specific variant of the Draken that was in the sky at a given time, the entire line of Draken fighter planes demonstrated a truly impressive level of performance in the sky. It was capable of punching through the air with incredible force, giving it a particularly high speed at altitudes closer to sea level when taken relative to other fighter aircraft. Although it was designed for an interceptor role, the Draken proved in tests and exercises that it was more than capable of functioning as a dogfighting aircraft.

It was easy to maintain, cheap to keep in the Swedish air fleet, and relatively simple to fly considering just how much power was behind the stick. Early sensitivity problems with how quickly it was willing to pitch up and down, were quickly brought under control, and it could be easily taken apart and put back together for engine access.

But that’s not to say that the plane wasn’t demanding to fly. In reality, Draken pilots had to be very careful not to enter superstalls, when tilting the plane upward or even downward while traveling at high speeds would cause a tremendous amount of drag and make it difficult for the plane to keep enough momentum to fly. It was also quite unstable in the air, due to its lack of a tail section, and it was hard to land as well.

But all that being said, the Draken was still an incredible gift to its own pilots once they mastered its peculiarities. The only people with real complaints about the Draken, at least within the Swedish Air Force, were the flight instructors forced to sit in the backseat in the trainer position. With only minimal forward visibility, those trainers were forced to peer through a periscope that flight instructors themselves described as, quote, “staring through two toilet paper tubes”.

But there’s one other special capability that the Draken had in its arsenal, that no other aircraft of the time could demonstrate. Its name, is the Cobra maneuver. Now, we’ll pause for a moment and take a breath while the legions of fighter plane nerds watching this video go crazy like frat boys watching a keg-stand, so that we can explain what the Cobra actually is. Basically, it’s a maneuver that takes advantage of the Draken’s ability to superstall. During the course of training pilots to avoid these dangerous superstalls, Swedish airmen learned that it was possible, when flying a Draken at a moderate speed, to raise their nose quickly to a vertical, and then a slightly-past-vertical attitude. That sends the plane into a stall, and slows it down very quickly, but as the Swedish Air Force realized, if you were to hit your airbrake right afterward while still stalled out, you could drop your plane back into its normal position. Fire the engines at full power, and you’d be flying safe again.

That particular maneuver gets so much acclaim, because at least on paper, it’s a very effective way to go from a bad situation in an aerial dogfight to a good one. Basically, if you’re in a Draken and you’re being chased by an enemy pilot, the Draken maneuver will allow you to slow down rapidly and cause the pursuing aircraft to overshoot your position—basically flying straight past you, so that when your nose comes back down, you’re the one in pursuit. It’s also an incredibly demanding move to pull off, with both the plane and the pilot having to undergo extreme physical stress in the process, while the pilot in particular needs to remain exceptionally aware of their situation in order to recover the superstall.

But in the Draken’s case, not only did the plane’s Swedish pilots manage to teach it to themselves and each other, but they pulled it off with the first aircraft for which the Cobra was really an option. The Cobra name itself came later; in Sweden, the move was known to pilots as the Kort Parad, or the short parry, a term borrowed from fencing. Pilots Bengt Olow and Ceylon Utterborn were credited with the discovery, which took place in the first couple of years of Draken service in the 1960s.

On Standby

Now, as we mentioned previously, Sweden’s use of the Draken was going to pay off in one of two ways. In an ideal world, it would keep Sweden’s airspace safe over the course of its service life, in a prolonged situation of peace in which World War III did not break out. In a significantly less-ideal world, the Soviet Union and the United States would decide to begin a nuclear apocalypse, and the Draken would do its best to keep Swedes safe from immediate death in bomb blasts while they made ready for decades of nuclear winter.

Look around, pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming, and rejoice; Sweden, like everybody else, got the non-apocalypse option. But with Sweden disinterested in participating in any conflict less cataclysmic than a World War, that also meant that the Draken, at least in Swedish service, never had to handle the demands of combat.

But what the Draken did have to handle, was a whole lot of aerial interceptions in peacetime. With Sweden sharing the Baltic Sea with the Soviet Union, both nations were at liberty to use the sea’s designated international waters for their patrols, but whenever Soviet planes came close to Sweden, it was on the Draken to be able to intercept them and escort them away. In the first few years of Draken flights, we can only imagine how the aircraft must have looked to Soviet pilots, an ultra-advanced aircraft in comparison to the MiG-21 and Su-9 aircraft they were flying at the time.

It’s sort of like the modern US flying F-35s over Central America, only for Guatemala to send some hyper-advanced alien spacecraft to ask those F-35s to choose another route. In the case of the Swedish pilots and their Drakens, they often chose to use the Cobra as a surprise tactic, sometimes with a more playful, “look what I can do” tone about it, and sometimes with an air of, “never forget that we Swedes can ruin a lot more than your day.” Word about the maneuver actually didn’t spread past these encounters for quite a while; in the early years, it was kept secret by Sweden, and when the Soviets eventually figured it out, they took credit for its creation.

Elsewhere in the Swedish Air Force, the Draken waited ready for any indication that it might be needed. In times of potential crisis, it was the first aircraft to be shifted into Sweden’s network of wartime-only bases, a network of runways that gave the Draken quick and complete coverage of the entire Swedish territory. During more peaceful times, the plane was very well-liked by its pilots, and used for all manner of purposes to set new Swedish flying records, perform feats of daring and ingenuity, and all the other forms of aerial swashbuckling you’d expect from pilots with a very capable aircraft and lots of time on their hands. A total of 651 Drakens would ever be produced, with the vast majority of them spending their entire service lives in Sweden.

Now, when it came to export potential for the Draken, Sweden wasn’t exactly in a rush to hand their technology out. The Swedes were big believers in export controls regardless of the product, and the Draken especially, at this time in history, was not the sort of plane you’d want falling into a potential enemy’s hands. But three world nations were lucky enough to get their hands on the Draken: Austria, Denmark, and Finland.

It was offered to several other nations, including Switzerland, Argentina, Singapore, Belgium, Malaysia, and others, but was ultimately refused. The Drakens in the nations that adopted it, did get a few tweaks; the Danish versions flew through 1993 and were modified to be able to fill a better ground-attack role, while the Finnish Drakens were upgraded during the 1990s and finally replaced in 2000 by the F/A-18 Hornet. Austria flew theirs through 2005, while the US acquired six of them and flew them through 2009 as part of the National Test Pilot School.

Like Sweden, none of these international Drakens ever saw combat, instead flying patrols and waiting on ready mode whenever things seemed as if they might pop off. However, the Finns and the Austrians did at least figure out the Cobra, with the Finns using it on one occasion while intercepting a Hawker Siddeley Nimrod aircraft and impressing the hell out of the plane’s British pilots.

But both in Sweden, and everywhere else, the Draken era couldn’t last forever. Sweden was not the sort of nation to leave defense matters till the last minute, and by the time the Draken entered service in 1960, the Swedish Air Force had already decided on a successor aircraft. Its name was the Saab 37 Viggen, translating to either the Thunderbolt, or the much less threatening Tufted Duck, depending on which meaning of the Swedish word “Vigg” that you use.

The Viggen prototype took its first flight in 1967, just a few years after the Draken had been dispatched around Sweden, and by 1971, the Viggen was in service too. With greater operational versatility, a higher maximum speed, and much more powerful engines, the Viggen was a clear successor craft to the Draken, meant for a whole new generation of fighter aircraft.

Of course, it’s not a great look for a dragon to get beaten out by a tufted duck, and the Draken and its pilots put up a good fight against the Viggen. In mock dogfights between the two aircraft, Draken pilots very frequently utilized the Cobra maneuver against the Viggen, which couldn’t perform the move safely at any useful speed. Viggen pilots were never taught the maneuver en masse, and although their fellow Swedes could use the move behind the controls of a Draken, no other aircraft at the time were believed to be able to use it, so Viggen pilots weren’t taught to defend against it either. Thus, they were often very surprised to learn it was possible during the heat of a mock dogfight itself. The Cobra would be retired not just for Viggen pilots, but for pilots of the JAS 39 Gripen, Sweden’s current multirole fighter aircraft. But one maneuver couldn’t stop the passage of time, and the Viggen was, all things considered, a better and more appropriate plane for Sweden’s evolving needs.

Over the coming years, the Draken would be slowly phased out of service, although the many delays and cost overruns of the Viggen’s successor program, the Gripen, meant that some Draken models had to be modernized and have their service lives extended. The initial goal was for the Draken to keep flying through the 2000s, an exceptionally long life for any fighter aircraft in a modern military, but because of budgetary issues and the increasing cost of maintenance on such a vintage plane, the Draken fully ended its service life in Sweden in December of 1999. By just a hair, the Draken was consigned to memory as a plane of exclusively the twentieth century, although a few would be kept in operation for things like airshows and other non-combat applications.

Legacy

When it comes to the legacy of the Draken, it’s an aircraft that’s forced to take the same critical knock on its service life that a whole, wide range of modern fighter jets have endured. It simply never saw combat, and whether it would have been a complete dud or the best aircraft of its era, we’ll simply never know. But what it most certainly was, was an innovator from start to finish.

In its early days, it was a technology testbed for ambitious aerospace engineers who, in retrospect, got just about every element of the Draken’s design just right. In the hands of its pilots, it was capable of incredible feats that would take decades for the major powers of the world to replicate, and while it wasn’t an outright better plane than the one that replaced it, it was a grizzled veteran with more than enough tricks up its sleeve to prove it still belonged. The Draken never saw combat, and it never will…but as far as neutral Sweden was concerned, that was the best-case scenario regardless of what its plane might have been capable of.

Sweden still exists today, and thus, the Draken’s entire reason for existence has been conclusively validated. Of all the legacies the Draken might have had, we’d hazard a guess that its real-life legacy is one that its pilots must have been proud to leave behind.

Key Takeaways

• The Saab 35 Draken was a groundbreaking Cold War-era fighter designed for Sweden’s defense.
• Its unique double delta wing design provided structural strength and fuel capacity.
• The Draken’s Cobra maneuver allowed it to rapidly decelerate and evade pursuers.
• Sweden’s Draken fleet never saw combat, fulfilling its role in a non-apocalyptic scenario.
• The Draken’s legacy includes innovative design and impressive aerial capabilities.

Sources

• Original MegaProjects video: The Saab 35 Draken: The Groundbreaking Fighter Nobody Talks About
• https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/saab-35-draken-one-remarkable-fighter-one-mission-208029
• https://www.airvectors.net/avj35.html
• https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/saab-35-draken-fighter-jet-russia-never-wanted-battle-207482
• https://medium.com/a-short-history/saab-35-draken-a-short-history-2afdf73cbad7
• https://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.php?aircraft_id=121
• https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/draken.htm
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep24665.7
• https://icds.ee/en/from-isolationist-neutrality-to-allied-solidarity-the-swedish-road-to-nato-membership/
• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/sweden-ends-200-years-of-military-neutrality-joins-finland-in-seeking-nato-membership
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RzZ5edBhVI&t=1125s&ab_channel=AircrewInterview
• Hero image source by Estonian Foreign Ministry / openverse, by.

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