Several decades prior to Pugachev showing off his cobra, during the early 1960s, the maneuver was performed by Swedish pilots flying the Saab 35 fighter jet. It was invented during training on how to recover from super stalls (also known as deep stalls) which the double delta tailless design of the Saab 35 is prone to. Simplified, a super stall is an uncontrollable stall which is much harder to recover from than a standard stall. Super stall plagued the early years of the Saab 35's service life, leading to several deaths, which in turn lead the Swedish air staff to implement extra training on how to counteract and recover from it. What came out of this was the Cobra maneuver. When pulling high alpha, the pilot would have noticed that he was going into super stall, and he would then have pulled negative alpha to get out of it. The effects this maneuver had on the aircraft's speed were noted and pilots started to purposely use it as a way to lower speed. The first Swedish pilots to discover the Cobra were the test pilots and , which developed or invented the technique around 1961-1963.