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Old 28th Aug 2017, 16:47
  #17 (permalink)  
pax britanica
 
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: se england
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Not very forthcoming with answers other than vegetable nomenclature which is a shame as I lived in Sweden for nearly three years and was very interested in their Air force (Flygvapnet} as our company office was close to the now disused base at Barkaby NW of Stockholm.

In my time there occasional two or four ship deployments took place and if you had any advance notice (which i did as a work colleague was a SF reservist and knew I like planes, it was neat to see them pull off the very very short landing and vanish into the trees where solid rock hardened shelters were concealed. One time-I think the Gorbachov crisis in Russia saw a whole squadron deploy there .

Saw a couple of excellent airshows again featuring the SAAB fighters ground tricks, short take off roll short landing and reversing capability: icey runways and psudo runways (lots of pieces of straight road in Sweden are designated emergency runways with full markings and the trees cut back 50m or so from the road with odd little turn offs seemingly going no where. Also saw them on occasional flypasts over Stockholm, National Days, Swedes winning world ice Hockey championship, etc.

But they are pretty secretive lot although very clever engineers designers and innovators and achieve a lot considering there is only about 10m of them and back then, early 90s were a lot more secretive as they were firmly neutral although there was never much doubt in their minds that if a push came to a shove they would side with NATO. after the cold war was declared over it came out that most of their air bases were Nato compatible when it came to aspects of layout, refueling arrangements etc.
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