Saab 91 Safir

The Saab 91 Safir, Swedish for sapphire, is a three or four-seat single-engine trainer aircraft. Saab built 203 of them at Linköping, Sweden, and De Schelde built another 120 at Dordrecht in the Netherlands. Development began in 1944 as one of three civil programmes meant to offset falling military orders after the war, alongside the Scandia airliner and the Saab 92 car. Anders J. Andersson, who had earlier worked on the all-wood Bücker Bestmann, designed it, and it was mainly of metal with fabric-covered control surfaces. The prototype flew on 20 November 1945 with a de Havilland Gipsy Major engine. Military customers found that underpowered, so the 91B used a Lycoming O-435, and the four-seat 91C and 91D followed. It served in Norway, Finland and Austria into the 1980s and 1990s.