Saab wants to re-energize its attempt to join the small club of companies that produce antisubmarine warfare aircraft.
For some years, the Swedish company has been offering the Swordfish ASW aircraft, based on the long-out-of-production Saab 2000 regional airliner. Today, however, it announces a new Swordfish project, with a choice of Bombardier platforms: the Global 6000 business jet and the Q400turboprop airliner.
The project competes with a similar pair of ASW systems offered by Israel Aerospace Industries, on the Q400 and Global 5000, and to some extent withAirbus Defense’s CN235 and C295.
The market for high-end ASW is going to expand, Saab believes, as the number of submarines grows: Asia is a prime market because the company expects that there will be more than 100 submarines in the region by 2020, an increasing number of them being the dangerous and super-sneaky breed of air-independent propulsion (AIP) boats.
Saab presents two qualifications for the ASW market. The first is its expertise at integrating complex airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems, such as the new GlobalEye. Second, since its 2014 acquisition of the Kockums shipyard, in Malmö, Saab itself builds some of the most dangerous and sneaky AIP submarines out there. (More than a few embarrassed surface-warship skippers, their ships photographed through periscopes that they had no idea were there, can attest to this). “That puts us in a unique position to provide solutions,” says Joakim Mevius, head of Saab’s airborne ISR unit.
Market reaction to the Saab 2000-based Swordfish, however, pushed the company to the new platforms. The Q400 has somewhat better performance and is being offered to customers who are “focused on operations nearer the home base,” Mevius says. But some customers are looking for regional-strategic capability, with long endurance at extended range and the speed to get there quickly. The Global 6000 can patrol for eight hours at 1,000 nm in ASW trim, Mevius says.
Processing and display hardware, and some data-fusion software, will be common to the GlobalEye air and surface surveillance system, the aim being “a very high-end capability with fewer operators.” Saab is working with partners on sensors, including Selex for the radar and General Dynamics Canada on the acoustic system, which supports state-of-the-art multistatic active coherent (MAC) processing – “the same kind of system as they have on the P-8A,” Mevius says. MAC tends to require a lot of sonobuoys and the Swordfish system is designed to carry “a significant load.”
Saab’s philosophy is that the ASW mission involves low-altitude work, and the company believes that the Bombardier platforms will work well in that environment. However, the Swordfish system does not require a magnetic anomaly detector, a long-standard low-level sensor, although it is available if an operator requires it.
Neither Swordfish version has an internal weapon bay. Many modern lightweight torpedoes are electrically powered and can be carried externally; internal carriage was needed for Otto-fuel torpedoes because of the propellant’s freezing point.

Saab Leads Newsmakers at Singapore Airshow
Saab headlined the news at the Singapore Airshow by providing full details of the swing-role surveillance system that it first revealed at the Dubai Airshow last November. Now named the GlobalEye, it is based on the Bombardier Global 6000 and Saab is also now offering its Swordfish maritime patrol system on that same business jet and on Bombardier’s Q400 turboprop twin. The Swedish company also announced that the new Gripen E combat jet version will be rolled out on May 18.