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Cutaway Lavochkin La-15 Fighter
Lavochkin La-15 Fantail. One of the fighters with performance that rivaled the more famous MiG-15. Like everything that happened in those years immediately after the war when there was a pressing need to be at the forefront of the latest aviation technologies, this is the case of a competition between firms. The MiG office, Lavochkin and Yakovlev, once the proposals that used the German BMW 003 and Jumo 004 engines had been discarded due to their extremely limited useful life of only 10 hours of use, in the USSR at that time there was no viable engine available (although several axial engines were being studied), which encouraged the acquisition of British engines, the country that led that technological segment, deciding in 1946 on Rolls Royce Derwent and Nene jet engines in 1946 after a technical visit to their factories facilitated by trade agreements between the two countries. The engines were quickly assigned to the construction firms to design fighter and bomber aircraft around those machines that were being copied by the Klimov firm, Yakovlev quickly resolved the request for a new pressurized fighter by creating the straight-winged Yak-23 but with the Derwent engine at the front, this did not meet the maximum speed specifications but was available very quickly, MiG developed the I-300 and Lavochkin the 174, both used the Rolls Royce Nene and in terms of performance the 174 was slightly superior in several areas, maneuverability and speed while the MiG was initially superior in climb, then it is worth asking why the 174 did not prevail, the answer is more technical because the wing of the 174 was more difficult to manufacture, its methods were designed to facilitate the construction of prototypes and had to be adapted to large series production, something that the MiG-15 dominated from the beginning, to top it off the engines RD-45 (Copy of the Nene) were destined for the most promising fighters (MiG-15) and bombers (Ilyushin Il-28) to which production plants had been assigned, so the La-174 had to evolve towards an engine with less thrust, the RD-500 (Copy of the Derwent), whose adaptation was not complicated given the similarities in technique and dimensions, even so with a loss of thrust of around 700 kg the small La-15 fighter maintained excellent performance that continued to surpass the MiG-15 in several parameters, only the technical failures of the first aircraft forced constant redesigns that were done relatively quickly, vibrations, hydraulic failures among others. I should mention that the La-15 had an ejection seat of its own design, which retained the rear armour plate for the pilot, allowing the first successful ejection of a USSR pilot during a real emergency (Many pilots did not trust these brand new ejection seats, and there were cases of an old-fashioned abandonment when the pilot deactivated his seat, a fate that did not accompany other pilots who fatally decided to save the plane or eject at the last minute), also two prototypes of an operational training aircraft of the La-15 called 180-1 were created, of which two prototypes were built, tandem seats with less fuel capacity and only marginal loss of maximum speed due to the larger area of the windshield and the elongated and more voluminous cockpit. Fate and fortune were not on Lavochkin's side, who worked hard on improvements to his fighter, creating a powerful version with 45º swept wings and enviable performance with a maximum speed at altitude of Mach 0.98, which could beat the sound barrier in a slight dive. A fatal accident darkened the outlook and Stalin was not a friend of planes that killed his test pilots (in this case the fault was the pilot's for not knowing how to handle the unexpected opening of the cockpit cover and trying to close it and crashing in the attempt. This event, together with the decision to optimize resources and the MiG-15 leaving the plants in large numbers, led to the decision to close the plant and send the more than 250 fighters to destinations far from the sight of the hierarchy and commissioners. Even so, the small and light fighter remained in the front line until 1954, when they were retired due to lack of spare parts and maintenance. Motocar