“Built for Swedish highways, sold to the world.”
Sweden's parliament approved the JAS programme in June 1982, and the name "Gripen"—the griffin—won a public competition that September. On 9 December 1988, test pilot Stig Holmström lifted the first prototype into the sky above Linköping. A flight-control software glitch crashed that aircraft three months later, but Saab pressed on. By 9 June 1996, the Gripen entered service, designed to operate from 800-metre highway strips and turn around in ten minutes with a crew of conscripts. The lightweight canard-delta fighter now serves six nations and counting.
The Gripen was designed for 800-metre strips and a ten-minute turnaround with conscripts — if you regularly use short runways and a small ground crew, that capability has to be in the type design, not in a brave arrival brief.