Originally Posted by
Chu Chu
According to a program I listened to:
https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/165076, Sweden's cold-war training losses were quite high compared to other Western nations. Not taking away from what they accomplished, but it didn't come free.
I could believe that, I seem to remember their low flying was down to 30ft
Read Mike Rondots recollections from page 32 onwards, link below and a good read.
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 direc-
tion 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.
https://www.collectair.co.uk/pdf/interview-hr.pdf