Fuselage markings and their meanings

rpiereck · Post by **rpiereck** » 05 Mar 2007, 21:08

I am a little curious about fuselage markings on Sweish Air Force Safirs, my curiosity sparked by pictures of Safirs at airliners.net.

I am doing a repaint of 50085 6/75, and I thought that 50085 was the aircraft serial number, while 6/75 was the unit. However I found another Safir with the number 50085, but it's tail marking is 5/85:

Here is 50085 6/75: http://www.airliners.net/open.file/1072875/L/

Here is 50085 5/85: http://www.airliners.net/open.file/1040202/L/

So if 50085 is not the aircraft serial #, what is it? what are the meanings of the SAF fuselage markings?

Thanks!

Hakan_Olsson · Post by **Hakan_Olsson** » 05 Mar 2007, 21:19

I will try to sort things out a bit

The Safir was called 91 by SAAB since it was their project number. All Safirs have a serialnumber from SAAB that starts with 91.
91.001, 91.002 and so on.
The Swedish Air Force adopted their own serial numbers for the Safir which starts with '50' since the type was called 'Sk 50' in AF service. 'Sk' means 'skol', which means trainer.

So SAAB 91c 91.400 has the air force number 50085 since it was the 85th Safir delivered to the Swedish Air Force.
Why it switched numbers between 75 and 85 only God and the logisics people of the SAF know.

It has had the following markings:

'F' stand fore which wing or base the aircraft belonged to. As you can see 50085 has moved about a bit in it's career

91.400 SB 91C 1960-04-29 50085 F5-85 SAF
1972-08-22 50085 F11-75 SAF
50085 F6-75 SAF
50085 F5-85 SAF
1993-08-05 SE-LAP

On this site you can find a list of every Safir that was made and their markings/registrations:
http://www.fcfk.com/

Best regards,

Hakan_Olsson · Post by **Hakan_Olsson** » 05 Mar 2007, 21:33

Here's another interesting link, only in Swedish though.

http://www.lasf5.nu/

Click on 'Våra Flygplan' and SE-LAP and you will see some further pics

Click on 'Bildarkiv' and you can find 50085 marked as 85 in the pics.

The aircraft marked as 75 on this page is 50075, a Safir 91B with serial number 91.285 just to confuse you a little bit more.

rpiereck · Post by **rpiereck** » 05 Mar 2007, 23:20

Now the confusion surfaces... I am dealing with the same aircraft but with different markings. That makes sense.

On top of that, it seems that the F5-85 is the newest version of this aircraft... maybe it will be another repaint in the works...?

Tack så hemskt mycket!

Hakan_Olsson · Post by **Hakan_Olsson** » 06 Mar 2007, 01:24

50085, or 91.400 is probably the Safir that is most known to the Swedish public.
It was used for aerobatic displays for many years in both F6-75 and F5 (5 markings. The displays were performed by Alf Ingesson-Thor, one of those pilots who have the little extra that we others can only dream of.
He flies everything from gliders to jet fighters and his shows with the Safir was nothing short of spectacular.

http://www.airliners.net/open.file/1120192/M/

In the pic you can see the shiny tyre of the nosewheel. It's smeared with oil because of the inverted flying

Best regards,

rpiereck · Post by **rpiereck** » 06 Mar 2007, 03:08

Hakan,

Awesome stuff, great information and a bit of Safir's history.

Thanks for sharing!

Hakan_Olsson · Post by **Hakan_Olsson** » 06 Mar 2007, 18:30

Here's a couple of other links that might be of interest:

The second link gives some information about markings.

http://www.avrosys.nu/aircraft/

http://www.canit.se/~griffon/aviation/