LaGG-3
The Soviet Union's wartime production of fighter planes marked the early careers of designers who would go on to receive worldwide fame. To follow in the footsteps of Mikoyan and Gurevich, another brilliant technician was Semyon Alexseyevich Lavochkin, whose initials became synonymous with a family of fighters that lasted until the 1950s, from the LaGG-1 of 1940 to the La-11 of 1947, the last aircraft powered by a piston engine to serve in the Soviet air force.
As early as 1938, Lavochkin began working with two other gifted technologists, Vladimir Petrovich Gorbunov and Mikhail Ivanovich Gudkov, with whom he completed his first project. It was a single-seater fighter that was given the designation I-22 at first and then LaGG-1 later on; the prototype had its first flight on March 30, 1940. The aircraft was a low-wing monoplane, carefully studied from an aerodynamic point of view and fitted with the completely retractable landing gear. The fact that it was constructed completely of wood, with the exception of the moving elements, which were metal, and the fabric covering, made it unusual among its kind: the fuselage, empennage, and wings had a supporting framework in wood onto which a covering of diagonal strips of plywood was glued using special resins. It was powered by a massive Klimov M-105 liquid-cooled V-12 engine that produced 1,050 horsepower at takeoff.
Sadly, the results of the test flights were less than ideal. So many adjustments were made before production started. Modifications included a larger fuel capacity, slats on the leading edge of the wings, a more robust and supercharged Klimov M-105 engine that could produce, and a three-bladed variable-pitch metal propeller. The prototype was renamed I-301, and once testing was finished, the fighter was sent into production with the official title LaGG-3.
In 1941, the manufacturing line started cranking out the first production aircraft. As was the case with the Yak-1 and the MiG-3, this fighter quickly rose through the ranks to become one of the most important aircraft of the new generation of Soviet Air Force aircraft during the early stages of the war.
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