JAS 39 Gripen: The Best Fighter Jet You Never Heard Of

The development of JAS 39 Gripen began when Sweden sought to build new fighters to replace its aging Saab 35 Draken and Saab 37 Viggen in the late 1970s. For a defensive dispersed basing plan in the case of invasion, the Swedish Air Force needed a cheap Mach 2 aircraft with good short-field performance; the concept included 800 meters long by 17 meters wide primitive runways from the Bas 90 system. One goal was to make the plane smaller than the Viggen while maintaining or increasing its payload-range performance.

The Saab 38, also known as the B3LA, was proposed as an attack aircraft and trainer, and the A 20, a modification of the Viggen, was proposed as a fighter, attack, and maritime reconnaissance aircraft. The General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon, the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet, and the Northrop F-20 Tigershark were among the foreign designs which were studied and taken as references.

The Gripen features a delta wing, which is wing-shaped in the form of a triangle. It also has a canard configuration with a negative stability design and fly-by-wire flight systems, replacing the conventional manual flight controls with an electronic interface. By 2020, more than 200 Gripens of various models, A to F, have been developed.