Gripen, lion of the sky: Sweden takes on the world with the first fighter of the 21st century.

Journal of Electronic Defense, August, 2004 by Sweetman, Bill

A country with fewer people than Michigan quite clearly has no business developing its own world-class combat aircraft. For the five decades in which the Swedish Air Force (Flygvapnet) and a dedicated team of contractors clustered around Saab (Linkoping, Sweden) have succeeded in doing exactly that, the world's fighter community has regarded their experience as a curiosity.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Then, late in 2001, the JAS 39 Gripen won the first two of a series of "new NATO" fighter competitions. Hungary and the Czech Republic selected the Gripen in the face of competition from the US and France, and despite not-too-subtle pressure from Washington to buy NATO. Now, the Gripen rolls into four more campaigns--Brazil, Poland, Slovakia, and...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.