This modest floatplane from 1931 was the first aircraft built by the Swedish Railroad Workshop's Airplane Department (ASJA), one of the cornerstones of today's SAAB.

Contrary to most other Swedish aeroplane makers, who started with licence production, the depicted plane was of the factory's own design (by Sven Bloomberg).

Production of the class marketed as ASJA L1 Viking was limited to two units only, the lives of which were short but sufficiently long to go down in the history of Nordic media - and shipping!

The first unit was bought by the newspaper Stockholms-Tidningen and is best known for making an 18-day-long-14-stage-big flight around the Baltic Sea, but its everyday business was somewhat less exciting and covered the carriage of newspapers and, for want of a better word, "flying reporters."

The second belonged to Reklamflyg, an advertising company, and was the first in Europe to be lost due to a collision with a ship. This regretful event happened in the Port of Västerås in May 1934.

Three months later, ASJA L1 Viking no. 1 followed suit, crashing in the fields near Sweden's capital...

Photo: Wikimedia Commons