*When visiting Sweden, the Swedish Air Force museum is one place you can not miss! Check it out here* flygvapenmuseum.se/en/start/

A former RAF pilot writing about when he got to fly with the Viggen: “‘The first to go up in the Viggen was our boss, Hilton Moses. I remember going out with him to the aeroplane and seeing him laughing and smiling, and then seeing him getting out and coming back to the crewroom looking like he’d just been put through some kind of crazy combination between a fairground ride and a washing machine. Then I went flying in the afternoon, and it changed my life. ‘They would fly around at Mach 0.95, 650kt give or take a bit, and they trained at 10m. We flew through firebreaks in trees, we flew all over northern Sweden at 30ft, and we never went below 600kt. All of this, I should add, was done under about a 150 to 200ft overcast with no breaks. In the RAF, anybody who wanted to get old would not have flown in that weather. After about 40 minutes, we pulled up into cloud, and the pilot then flew a 4-degree hands-off approach with his hands on his head into a remote airstrip, landed, reversed into a parking bay, did an engine-running refuel without any communication with the people on the ground except hand signals, taxied out and took off in the direction that we’d landed in. Wind direction just wasn’t factored. Then we did some approaches onto roadways, flying at 15 or 20ft to clear the cars and warn them that there were going to be some aeroplane movements before doing practice approaches. And the aerobatics beggared belief. ‘The next day, it was time to take the Swedish pilots flying in the Jaguar. I was at a bit of a loss as to how I was going to explain to this guy that we flew at 420kt when they flew at 620kt. So I decided that the way ahead was to leave the part-throttle reheat in, accelerate to 620kt and then give him the aeroplane. That’s what I did - I took off, and gave him control at 620kt and about 150ft. He pushed the nose down, took the Jaguar down to 30ft and proceeded to fly it at about 30 to 40ft and 600kt-plus quite happily. It knocked all the myths about who’s got the best aeroplanes, who’s got the best-trained pilots and so on. The Swedish Air Force had aeroplanes that were light years ahead of anything the RAF had, or was going to get, or has got now, and their pilots were in a totally different league to us. This was not just an individual - I flew with three of them, and all three were like that. Each of them was able to fly the Jaguar faster and lower from the back seat than I could from the front seat.”

As a totally objective Swede, this is the 2:nd best looking airplane ever built, with Gripen as number 1, and Draken as number 3.

A pair of Viggens suddenly appearing at tree top height and passing by with that amazing ground shaking noise, thats the soundtrack to my 1980's childhood summers.

I love the little cheat-sheet on the right at 16:16. It tells you to check if the aircraft is on fire. If the answer is yes, you should jump out.

One of my fondest childhood memories are when I was out with our small boat in the archipelago and a pair of JA37s passed a couple hundered meters away from me, quite close to the water (guessing around 20m high). That sound... The 10 year old me inside me still giggles when thinking of it. Needless to say, I dropped the oars in an instant and put my fingers in my ears.

The "visit your local air museum" bit got me hard, as one of the nearby ones closed several years ago. Do as the man says, go patronize your local avation museum!

*What an absolutely fantastic piece of Swedish engineering.* Imagine all the superpowers of the time having budgets of billions and billions of dollars, still Sweden with its comparably quite modest means managed to come up with this beast that in many aspects was clearly ahead of its time. It's mindboggling how Sweden *time and again* invented military master piece after master piece, which quite often even outperformed the equipment of the military behemoths of the cold war.

Hats off to Sweden for creating such outstanding fighter jets despite being a relatively small country. 👏🏻

A few additions on the outside in the compartment for the ram air turbine. 10:00 1. The funny looking tube with a small red funnel, on the left, is the fire extinguisher port for the starter turbine. It was not common but it happned that you could get a bad start which resulted in a fuel fire in the starter turbine. There is a red light above it that indicated fire. You then emptied the fire extinguisher in to the pipe to get to the turbine. The test buttons for the fire light had a funny "feature". If the pilot pressed the varning planel test button in the cockpit, the fire light in the RAT compartment would also turn on. A less experienced mechanic would then empty the fire extinguisher in to the starter turbine thinking there was a fire. Vice versa if the mechanic pressed the test button next to the fire light, the pilot got a fire indication on his panel... well you can imagine the rest 😅 2. On the right you have ports for oxygen (for the pilot) and nitrogen (brake preassure etc.) with a pressure indicator for each. 3. The socket on the right side that looks like a hydraulic jack, is exactly that. It's used for manually pumping up the brake pressure so you could use the brakes without the electrical system on. Used primarily when towing. Viggen has many small design details to enable it to work with no or very limited ground support. The pilot can start without ground support. With only one mechanic you could do all ground operations if necessary. The turnaround time (re-fuel,re-arm), with a full ground crew, was between 7-10 min depending on weapon load, in the field, taking off from a road. All to make it as hard as possible for our not so friendly neighbor in the east 😉 Great video! Thanks!

@15:20 below the anemomachmeter is also a set of three lights which indicate the selected afterburner stage (1,2,3)

The Viggen is the coolest looking Cold War jet. No, you can't change my mind

I grew up with Viggens regularly flying over my house, that was neat.

Good work describing the cockpit of the JA37. I worked on it but never flew it, but as far as I could see, you got just about everything correct. The tactical display was very important for its efficiency. For the first time, the JA37 could operate effectively without constant GCI support. Behind this were a good Pulse Doppler radar (MPD) and the first implementation of the fighter datalink that was further developed to the Gripen (also called TAU=Tactical Air Unit link). It meant JA37 formations could operate without visual contact with each other but still as a tactical unit. When the JA37 got the AIM-120 (which should be this late version), it got very lethal due to the MPD radar, TAU link, and TI display with electronic map+real time tactical information, all combined with a Fox-3 missile.

Swedish aviation is like the Australia of eco-systems. It is as if it branched off early and developed in a completely different way. Some brilliant innovation for sure. What a masterpiece of cold war jet fighter. Great video... I almost feel like I can service a JA-37 now. 😁

Just want to let you guys know that there is a Viggen simulator in the museum at Skavsta. It's a production aircraft cockpit that's flown, but has been converted into a simulator, using fresnel lens displays. Unfortunately the cockpit instruments and lighting is not operational in it, and Viggen has a fantastic night lighting setup, but if you pay a small amount you can fly the sim and check out the cockpit. Plus the museum is staffed by old pilots and aircraft nerds who are fascinating to talk to. Highly recommended, its a much smaller museum than linkoping, but absolutely worth a visit!!

Had no idea the Viggen had so many innovative features. A beautiful and unique aircraft!

I wasn't expecting a vertical stabilizer that folded at its base! Very novel! Thanks for the video!

Love that one-take celebration!

07:00 A note, the BAS 90 system called for one main runway of 2 000 - 2 300 meters, and then auxiliary runways - _some_ of which could be on roads - that were 800 meters.

As an American that worked with many Aerospace companies I always was impressed with the Swedish p

These walk arounds and cockpit views are wonderful. So much is revealed about an aircraft in this process.

Before the advent of glass cockpits the Viggen was a masterclass in Cockpit ergonomics.

You’re the Golden Child for real Chris!!!! The greatest human being to ever live!!!!

Great Review. In the past I owned several Saab cars & everything was always so perfectly placed, with a slight curve so further away controls were still easy to reach. Easy to fantasise (When much younger) that I was in a "Ground Cockpit" 😁

Great video, amazing amount of info in one take before climbing in! I was lucky to see an AJ37 last summer at Sola airshow in Norway (ENZV). That and a Draken. What machines, hats off to Sweden.

Can't fool me, that's the interior of a TIE fighter!

I visited the museum last year while it was in renovations so didn't get to see the full inventory. Def recommend visiting, the town where the museum is located is also very nice!

Superb video as usual. Very educational. Bravo.

Hello Chris. During the 80s, you could see at air shows how the Viggen landed and took off on very short run ways. It was a mighty sight. Thanks for your interesting videos. Greetings from Sweden

A good walkaround of the only fighter jet that can pull off a three point turn. Good stuff Chris.

As someone who grew up close to a Draken base (not in sweden) when i saw the Viggen the first time on an airshow in 1994 i was excited to see the successor of what i was familiar to see every day. And when the pilot did the J turn on the runway mid display and the chins of the crowd dropped i liked it even more. It has stayed a favorite for me. (sure nothing can replace the Draken in my heart, but it comes close) And on later airshows i actually started watching the crowd more during the J turn. As it was quite fun to see those who knew what was comming being excited for it, and those who did not looking in awe. (The only other aircraft i have seen surprising people as much on an airshow was the Harrier when most of the crowd didn't know it could start and land vertically, hoover and actually go backwards. In the only Harrierdisplay i wittnessed live, the pilot started conventional, did a circle to the right and slowed down approaching the runway and stopped mid runway turning sideways, "bowing his head", and going backwards. Not even the Mig29 and SU27 with the cobras surprised the crowds as much on the airshows i visited as advertizing meant people knew about it beforehand)

Great video, Chris...👍

Such an amazing plane, seeing them fly is just stunning

Fastest biplane ever built! --very positive stagger to the planes! Clever how they did it without struts. ;-)

Olav: "Did you see that?! That jet fighter just landed on the highway, backed up, and did a 3-point turn!" Sven: "Sure Olav - I believe you! Haha!" Olav: "and now the rudder is waving at me!" Sven: ""Stop drinking Olav - you're seeing things again!" What an amazing airplane - always one of my favorite cold war airplanes!

Excellent review of the aircraft. I think it was a outstanding aircraft of its time with some very innovative features. The Oerlikon KCA 30mm cannon was the same round used by the A-10 Warthog. I read somewhere that the Viggen had a feature that it could use computers and the autopilot to link to the gun in pitch to provide better accuracy in air to air mode. I believe the Viggen was the most under rated fighter aircraft of its time.

I did my internship there just a couple months ago. It's awesome to see it getting recognized more on this platform!

Props to Sweden for going their own way in military aviation over many decades. Many innovative designs. I would find it difficult to believe they aren’t working on a 5th generation project these days after having been trounced by F-35 so many times in recent years.

Props for saying Linköping correctly

The first cockpit I had the pleasure to climb up and chill in belonged to a JA37 out of the F 21 Air Force Wing in Luleå back in 1990. I was 15 years old at the time and it was in for maintenance. I spent a week with the maintenance crew at F 21 sort of helping out with the maintenance as best as a kid could do. I remember the best part was when I was sitting in the cockpit and was instructed to move the stick in various directions with the hydraulic system in operation and watching the flight control surfaces move.

I liked your mention of the Viggen's ECM capabilities.

This was excellent... as usual!

Such a great video, I truly admire how you go into all the details! Regarding the spine of the plane, if you compare the prototype aircraft with the production ones, you notice that the latter have sort of a "bulge" on top (compare with the stock footage you have of the prototype where it has a "non-bulge" black panel instead). This came to be as the aircraft was shown to have a poor cross section area which caused buffeting when entering M1 speeds. Saab "locked" their engineers in a house in the village of Rimforsa outside of Linköping until they solved the problem, and hence the bulge came to be known as rimforsabulan. At least, that's the legend as far as I remember it.

I always thought these aircraft looked badass. Not in a stealth/futuristic way, but looking quite brutal in a beautiful way.

Gorgeous plane! I always like how Swedish engineers put their own details on everything they make (planes, cars/trucks, ships, etc).

Dunkle Cockpits in dunklen Hallen/Hangars sind nicht ganz einfach. Da hatte ich auch schon so meine Probleme. Große LED Scheinwerfer auf der Kamera montiert sind wahrscheinlich der einzige Weg um das ordentlich einzufangen ohne den "Keller Charakter" zu erzeugen. Sehr informatives video, wie immer top!

Wonderful warplane!...sensible, totally practical design and uniquely good looking. Well thought out design. 👍Nordic Warrior!✊✊✊

Cool video!

Gotta love the Vig always one of my favourite planes just looks menacing sitting there could they not have turned the lights on for you so we could see this beautiful aircraft in all its glory

"Reflector Stripes"? These are Formation Lights I would say... (@11:10)

Thanks for this post. Awesome aircraft 👌💪🇸🇪💪🇸🇪

IIRC the wing inboard of the landing gear was originally intended to have the same wingbsweep as the wing outboard of the landing gear. However, there were problems with the interacts of airflow over the wing caused by the canard and its flap and to cure it they changed the wingsweep of the 8nner wing panel.

The cockpit looks so pristine

*Brilliant & fascianting as usual* And confirmation if ever I needed it that any attempt on my part to fly a warplane should be confined to lobbing bricks out of a microlight

Chris, as always... great work. Have you thought of doing a comparison video of the J-21A and the J-21R? The differences in the cockpit layout would be very interesting.

Great job!

I always watch the full video before I, eventually, like it, but this time I clicked that thumb up as soon as the video started; as a child of the early 80s, Viggen has always been a favorite of mine.

The 3 point turn of the Viggen is so incongruous 🤣🤣🤣

Very nice Video thx.

So much different than the AJS-37 we all know and love. It's so funny to see the differences. It's still the same aircraft, but a different role (and 30 years of development) caused it to have all these little (and big) differences

Wow, you did your homework! I enjoyed that tour.

Funny how you upload this the day I get the Viggen in War Thunder

wonderful flying machine

That was neat! Thank you.

4th fighter wing! My father used to work with those planes! Many great stories!

Great video, thank you. Now I feel the urge to go to DCS :)

You are to jets what Lindybeige is to armies and tanks. I love it, wonder what a conversation between you two would look like.

Love the draken , love the gripen , shame the Ace combat series did not include the viggen so we could try all of the great swedish planes

In the late 80s and throughout the 90s we had the Swedish/Finnish comic "Achilles Wiggen" (written and drawn by Finnish author Kari Leppänen, though I think primarily published in Sweden), about a Viggen pilot that gets transported to another planet with his plane and engages in dogfights with aliens. Kinda wish we'd see a movie or game adaption of that story.

Excellent! Soooo, we can look forward to Lansen and Tunnan too, maybe?

Cool. A fighter that can parallel park!

@11:10 those are formation strip lights , they are used to fly in formation at night

My SAAB 95 interior looks exactly the same ;)

@14:18 - I may be wrong but there were a lot of various pods on Viggens, I suppose these were designed "to rule them all"? @15:08 - wasn't that D49 ground-pressure calibration altimeter? AMAZING video, as always! Thank you!

The Viggen requires emergency power from the RAT only if it's desirable to get the plane back onto the ground in a condition where it's flyable afterward; admittedly, it's a much more cost-effective option to bring a damaged plane back to be repaired rather than requiring a new one to be issued. Certainly a significant reduction in paperwork.

Wonderful presentation of an aircraft that doesn't get the credit it deserves.

So my only experience with the Viggen is a couple hundred hours in DCS, which has a different variant, but at a glance I'm not certain the navigational system is an INS. At least, the nav panels look almost identical to the attack variant I'm used to and that one only has a Doppler nav system. I wonder which one of these is the control panel for the datalink, supposedly the interceptor Viggens had a really advanced system for the time. edit: also I'm jealous of the variants that could carry ECM pods on the outboard stations, all I get are outdated Sidewinders :(

So Beautiful

Swedish engineers should of course be proud of this achievement. That being said you also have to acknowledge a bunch of German Aero engineers coming to SAAB post 1945. Also making this system the cutting edge air war machine was the US computer system that was traded in the Swedish-US nuke scrapping deal. (Sweden was the 4th! nation to develop nuclear bomb capability but lacked the nuke delivering system until the development of JA37. The deal also gave Sweden a place under the US nuke umbrella).

This is such a good looking aircraft! Perhaps not graceful and sleek, but beautiful anyway, and massively brutal!

At about 11 minutes in, you mention "reflector stripes" under the canard, just before climbing into the cockpit. I think those are actually formation lights, to help other Viggens during formation flying in the dark. So they are not reflecting light, they are light sources in themselves. A faint, spooky green light. Formation flying in the dark would only be done when on a ground attack mission, I suppose, but the JA37 does have a ground attack capability, so those lights make sense.

You should take a look at the Viggen in Digital Combat Simulator! Very nice to be able to fly it!

The "reflector strips" are actually formation light strips. They are low intensity, usually a luminescent green color, that allow night form flying.

To quote RAF Jaguar pilot Mike Rondot after flying backseat in Sk37 with Peter Lindén; ”Peter, when viggen accelerates, the foreskin gets pulled back”

Lovely plane :)

One take! Nice 😎👍🏼

During peak cold war the squadrons would have a pair of these on standby with running engines 24/7. Unknown source

okay, *now this is epic* *puts on aviators ready to nerd out

The Drakken next please. ❤

Thanks! Always liked the Viggen, such a special aircraft. PS: that's a lot of "of course" ;-)

Fantastic and versatile plane. Made the Tornado and Jaguar look very generic... That the cockpit layout is intelligent and practical is normal, as can be seen in older Volvo's and SAAB cars.

Viggen... my beloved

Hello, I was wondering if perhaps there is a way you could make a video discussing the evolution of Japanese aircraft camouflage, I have notice that the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy have a variety of wacky camouflage patterns and it is an interesting topic, I have also seen discussion on Japanese aircraft paint quality so I would like to hear a discussion on it as a whole, thank you😁

Fantastic, unique and very deadly aircraft. What a history Sweden has in its military (particularly the Air Force). Gave the Migs a run for their money many times, no doubt.

No one builds jets like saab❤

Looove the Viggen! Such a brute cold war warrior bad ass! A real heavy local bar " beerdrinker" unlike the way too boring , small and sensitive cafe latte drinking jet set Gripen😁

Great video , I know they’re retired but how many Viggens are currently flying ?

Great upload as usual but a petty point, its not Viigen, it is Viggen.

I’m not sure if this is unique to Swedish aircraft, but has anyone noticed that a lot of the instrument glass is coated in the gorgeous blue tint? Reminds me of a fancy watch.