The project was initiated in response to a 1938 request from the Flygvapnet (Swedish Air Force) for a reconnaissance aircraft to replace the obsolete Fokker S 6 (C.Ve) sesquiplane.

The design chosen was a conventional mid-wing cantilever monoplane with a long greenhouse canopy and a single radial engine in the nose.

A floatplane version was built in small numbers for coastal reconnaissance to replace the obsolete Svenska Aero S 5, with massive fairings joining the floats to the wings where the wheels would have been.

The B 17B used a Bristol Mercury XXIV built by Svenska Flygmotor AB (SFA) in Sweden, and the B 17C used an imported 1,060 hp (790 kW) Piaggio P.XI radial from Italy.

[4] The United States government denied a request to purchase a licence to build the Twin Wasp, so an unlicensed, reverse engineered copy was built instead as the STWC-3 (Swedish Twin Wasp C-3) to supplement and replace the lower powered Mercury radials already being built under licence.

[1] Problems immediately arose with wing failures, and additional modifications were needed before it could be cleared for dive bombing, which remained limited to shallow attacks thereafter.

[7] Stig Wennerström gained some fame in Sweden for successfully bailing out from a B 17 from low altitude, with his gunner, but would later become a spy for the Soviet Union.

[8] For several months in late 1944 and early 1945 fifteen B 17As were operated by the Danish Brigade in Sweden (Danforce) a unit of 5000 men (including 50 airmen) in Sweden which had been formed to assist in liberating occupied Denmark from the Nazis, and preventing the retreating German soldiers from using civilians as human shields, and carrying out scorched earth tactics as they had done elsewhere.