Lavochkin La-5

The La-5 began as a failure. The LaGG-3, designed by Lavochkin with Gorbunov and Gudkov, was an all-wooden fighter built that way for a hard reason — the Soviet Union had very little aluminium and a great deal of timber — and powered by the same Klimov M-105 inline that drove the Yaks. The airframe was strong and heavy, the engine was not powerful, and the arithmetic did the rest.

Pilots gave it a nickname that turned its designation into a verdict: Lakirovanny Garantirovanny Grob — the varnished, guaranteed coffin. It was not entirely fair, since the airframe was strong and the type served throughout the war, but it captured the essential problem: an aeroplane heavy enough to need power it did not have. By early 1942 production was being wound down in favour of Yakovlev’s fighters, and Lavochkin’s design bureau was on the point of losing its factory, its programme and its reason to exist.

The rescue was brutally simple in concept and difficult in execution: take out the sleek but weak liquid-cooled inline, and put in the Shvetsov M-82 — a 14-cylinder radial of about 1,700 hp, half again the power of the engine it replaced. The problem was that a radial is fat. Grafting a barrel-chested engine onto a fuselage designed around a slim V12 meant reshaping the whole forward structure and accepting a nose the pilot could not see past on the ground.

It worked, but not on paper alone: the conversion had to be proved on an airframe while the bureau’s future was being decided elsewhere, and the aircraft that emerged had roughly the same wings and tail with an entirely different character — heavier at the nose, more powerful, and far more tolerant of damage. In July 1942 it was ordered into full production, including the conversion of incomplete LaGG-3 airframes still standing on the line. Few aircraft of the war were so literally the salvage of another: some La-5s began life as the fighter their own pilots had nicknamed a coffin.

The La-5 reached the front in the late summer of 1942, in time for Stalingrad. It arrived among pilots who had spent a year being told, by experience rather than propaganda, that Soviet fighters were inferior — and who now had one that could stay with a Bf 109 in a turning fight at low altitude and absorb damage that would have brought down a lighter machine. The radial engine helped twice over: it delivered the power, and it sat in front of the pilot as several hundred kilograms of accidental armour, a protection no inline-engined fighter could offer.

The type was not superior at height, where the German fighters kept their advantage, and it was still short on range. But over a battlefield fought at low level, in an air war of massed formations rather than individual interception, those were the right compromises — and for the first time the Soviet fighter regiments had a machine whose limitations were tactical rather than fundamental.

The definitive version came in 1943. The La-5FN used the ASh-82FN with direct fuel injection, giving about 1,850 hp and a top speed near 648 km/h, and it was built in 5,047 examples — the majority of all La-5 production.

Below roughly 3,000 m the La-5FN could out-turn and out-accelerate the Bf 109G, and the Germans knew it: a captured example was flown and evaluated in Germany, and its low-altitude performance was reported as something their own pilots needed to respect. It was the first Soviet fighter about which that could be said without qualification.

Through all of this the aircraft remained largely wooden. Soviet aluminium went to bombers and to engines, so fighters were built from plywood, birch and delta-drevesina — a resin-impregnated compressed wood, tough and heavy. The consequences followed the aircraft everywhere: extra weight for a given strength, structures that suffered in damp and heat, and a machine that burned readily when hit.

It also meant a fighter could be built by carpenters as much as by metalworkers, in dispersed workshops, by a workforce trainable in weeks — which in 1942, with the aircraft industry newly re-erected beyond the Urals, mattered far more than the weight penalty. The cost was paid in the air: a wooden airframe soaked up moisture, changed its handling between seasons, and gave a fire something to feed on. Only with the later La-7 did metal wing spars replace the wooden structure, saving weight and buying back the performance the timber had cost.

The La-5 and its successor carried the highest-scoring Allied fighter pilot of the war. Ivan Kozhedub reached the front line in March 1943 and finished credited with 62 victories in about 330 sorties and 120 combats — a record no British or American pilot approached, achieved almost entirely on Lavochkin fighters, the La-5 first and then the La-7.

His record also traces the aircraft’s trajectory. A pilot arriving in 1943 flew a fighter that no longer had to be apologised for; by 1945 he was flying one good enough that on 19 February 1945, in an La-7, Kozhedub shot down a Me 262 — a propeller-driven fighter destroying a jet, which says as much about how the Lavochkin line had developed as any specification.

The La-5 is the clearest demonstration in the war of how much an engine decides. Nothing fundamental changed between the LaGG-3 that pilots called a coffin and the La-5 that could beat a Messerschmitt down low: same designer, largely the same airframe, in some cases literally the same aeroplane taken off the production line unfinished. What changed was 1,700 hp where there had been 1,100.

It also completes the picture of Soviet fighter design alongside the Yaks. Yakovlev pursued lightness — strip the airframe until the modest engine was enough, which produced the Yak-3. Lavochkin pursued power — accept the weight and fit the biggest engine that would go in the nose. Both answers were correct, both were built in the thousands, and between them they gave the Soviet air force the low-altitude superiority it held from 1943 onwards.

• Yefim Gordon, Lavochkin’s Piston-Engined Fighters (Midland, Red Star).
• George Mellinger, Lavochkin Aces of World War 2 (Osprey, Aircraft of the Aces 56).
• Yefim Gordon & Dmitri Khazanov, Soviet Combat Aircraft of the Second World War (Midland Publishing).