The Swiss have an Air Force?

One plane shown prominently in the video is the Northrup F-5E.

Also looks like they have some Swedish Viggens.

I spotted the F-5s and the Saabs right away but didn't notice the Mirage until the 3rd or 4th time I watched the video. Yeah, It's that good.
Thanks

I think the delta wing jet with the canards is an updated Mirage III, kind of like what Israel did with the Kfir. The Swiss have the Mirage III-B, III-D, III-R, and III-S. The Swiss don't have any Viggens. The Viggens are only used by Austria, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden. The small fighter with the long nose and short wings is the Northrop F-5E Tiger II.

I took a second look at the movie and there are only F-5s, F-18s, and Mirage III's. The Viggen has a different wing shape than any of the planes in the movie.

Supremely cool. Gets my heart pounding.

It's too bad the Swiss never put these to good use...nice vid, though.

good call on the F-5s, their short wingspan always throws me.

I've watched it a couple of times myself. And here all I thought the Swiss could do was make watches and run banks.

Most of their hangers and facilities are underground. When I was over there a few years ago, the tour guide pointed out a base. All we could see was apsects of a runway hidden in the country side. Nothing else was visible.

A slightly dated by still very good little book on the modern Swiss Army is La Place de la Concorde Suisse, by John McPhee.

http://www.amazon.com/Place-Concorde-Suisse-John-McPhee/dp/0374519323/sr=8-1/qid=1159184655/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0703468-6507224?ie=UTF8&s=books

Brilliant & breathtaking. Thanks for sharing. Now...if we could only channel that skill and that power where it's needed. We live in hope...

Who is their enemy? Who would they be fighting?

Judith..."Who is their enemy? Who would they be fighting?"

I don't know if your question is facetious or not, but a Swiss enemy could be anybody. They are as entitled to a defense of their territory as anybody, and they have tons of gold.

That the Swiss have been neutral in world affairs has, in many ways, come from their willingness to aggressively defend that neutrality.

I saw the F-5 and Viggen.

The reason nobody messes with the Swiss is they are tough and what invader would want to climb those damn mountains.

Aerospaceweb.org indicates that the canard is only used on the Mirage 50, Mirage 2000, and Kfir (which are evolutionary descendants of the Mirage III).

These guys rock. Video reminds me of a time a few years back skiing on a glacier in Switzerland when one of them flew up from *below* out of nowhere and then over us so close we could see the pilot in the cockpit. I ended up flat on my back looking up at the empty sky.

Nice vid. What I've read of Swiss military history was fascinating and impressive.

The Swiss have not always been totally neutral. They were basically Pro-Nazi which allowed the Germans to have a representative to the rest of the world even during WWII. The Swiss built Messerschmitts under license to Germany and certainly were active in accepting of gold etc stolen from Holocaust victims. And even if they had been totally neutral the inability to not acknowledge the moral disparity between the Axis and Allies and not to actively fight the evil of Fascism is not something to be proud of or boasted about.

@LarryK
"They were basically Pro-Nazi..."
No, That's just not true. 97% of the Swiss did hate the nazis and where ready to fight them, if necessary. Have a look at some unbiased history books.
Yes they sold weapons to Germany but also to the Allies.
Yes they made mistakes by rejecting thousands of jewish refugees (The USA and Sweden did it too).
Yes, they weren't heroes, attacking Germany, Austria, Italy and occupied France because they where six million people COMPLETELY surrounded by these enemies. Have a look at a map and try to understand the situation.
Yes, I'm defending my grandfathers here, I'm Swiss and member of the Swiss army.

company17 has it about right, and I'm saying this as a person who's anscestors were traditionally at odds with the Swiss at the best of times.

Some of those swiss fortifications from WWII were insanely awesome. Popup guns in box canyons that look like the cliff faces, popup artillery that looks like field or bushes. Brilliant stuff.

The aircraft I saw in the video were the already non-disputed F-18 and F-5E. A couple of the F-5 shots may have been F models too. some of the angles are hard to tell.

The other plane is some variant of the the Mirage III. The RS and DS variants both have canards. The ones in the videos look like the RS since the DS is a two-seater.

The closest thing Saab makes to what you see in the video are the JAS 39 Gripen and the JA 37 Viggen. While they look somewhat similar (delta wings with canards), looking at it for more than 1/2 a second shows the wing shapes to be different for the Saabs, the wing locations are different, and the canards on the Saabs are HUGE by comparison to what you see in the video.

Those F-5's you see are no longer flying under the Swiss flag - the U.S. Navy bought most/all of them about two years ago so that they could be used as Agressor planes; I worked in the program that helped integrate them back to U.S. Navy standards.

Swiss standards weren't good enough eh?

Why would you think Swiss watches and standards beat American ones? Did you know that the Swiss used to produce imitations of American watches? That was back in the days when the Great American Railroad Watch was one of the most accurate and revered pocket timepieces in the world - wind-up watches built to a nationwide standard and subject to such stringent inspection that they would get a down-check if they were off thirty seconds out of a fortnight. Larger versions of these pocket-watches were used as master ship's clocks during and after WWII.

Furthermore, it was the American military that practically invented industrial standards with the goal of interchangeable parts in the first place, a project that took a full century and something we didn't really perfect until the early 1900s.

Logistics. You guys really have to learn a little more about American military history. :)

Hi there,

for your information,

1) the Swiss Air Force still has around 45 F5E Tiger II (as you can see in this nice video) remaining in service. Originally Switzerland has bought 175 of them in the 70's to the U.S.
The department of defense plans to replace them by 2010-2012. Current competitors are F-18 Super Hornet, Dassault Rafale, Eurofighter and Saab Gripen. Remaining F5 will be sold back to the U.S. for their "Aggressors".

2) F-18, no discussion about that, we have 35 of them (36 initially, 1 crash few years ago)

3) there is NO viggen is Switzerland, NO.
Swiss has had numerous Dassault Mirage 3 in service a few year ago. They were bought during the 60's and are now all dismissed. But we still have one unit flying the RS (Recon version). They will be replaced by F-18 with recon pod.
Swiss Mirage all have small canards, specially designed by Dassault for the Swiss Army. These canards are unique and are not the same as the one on Mirage 5. Purpose is to increase maniability (usefull in the mountains) and behavior at low speed.

Hi,
I'm currently serving in the Swiss Air Force (ground force, just finished bootcamp and after xmas holidays starting officer candidate school).

As Switch says, we do not have Viggens, and we also no longer operate Mirage IIIs.
We still have plenty of F-5s, they pass over my head constantly, although yes, they will soon be replaced.

@John and Solomon2: wtf? where'd that come from? Of course the planes would have to be reintegrated: From warplane to aggressor. From Switzerland, Europe, to USA. It's quite likely that the navy wanted to improve them as well, but even if they didn't, they would have to work them over.
And just for your information, when Switzerland first recieved F-18s, the computer system was completely redesigned, and then sold back to the states. How's that?
You might be right, maybe America used to make the best watches. so? Now we do. Is that a big deal? Hell, your pilots wear our watches, our pilots fly your planes. Honestly, I'd rather switch roles any day of the year.

Reminds me of an old USSR joke.

"Comrade, just last week a Swiss soldier stole my Russian watch"

"Don't you mean a Russian soldier stole your Swiss watch?"

"Be that as it may, but it is you who said it and not I"

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