The Lavochkin

Lavochkin was appointed Chief Designer of OKB-301 in 1937. His office has designed and built thousands of fighter planes during World War II, from Lavochkin LaGG-1 until the Lavochkin La-9.

The first fighter Lavochkin was designated I-22 and was also the first of the triad of new Soviet interceptors to take flight, exactly March 30, 1939. As happens from there in 2-3 years with the fighters '5 Series' Italian, and Indeed, as already happened with 'Series 0', the three competitors will all have some success and everyone will be rewarded by production contracts, but without resemble very much less be subject to the same development and operational success.

Lavochkin - or Lavochin, depends transilitterazione - together with Gorbunov and Gudkov, had given rise to a hunting simple and robust, relatively good-looking, but he had the problem of the choice of strategic materials, or rather, the choice not to use them .

It was in fact the only one of the three that was built entirely of wood, except of course for the basic elements such as the shopping cart, the weapons, the engine, the ailerons (metal and coated canvas).

The retractable landing gear and the engine M-105P were signs of a relative modernity, and certainly worthy of note was its top speed of 605 km / h.

The weapons were high rates of fire, two and one ShKAS ShVAK.

Again designated as I-301, then took the name of LaGG-1.

But for the production became LaGG-3.