How good was the soviet air force? (1 Viewer)

[Ernest (Russia)]

I doubt if reading a few reports of quality for any particular nation's WWII airplanes qualifies us to make blanket quality statements about that nation's aircraft quality. All it really means is we read a few reports that weren't exactly glowing. Perhaps the people who translated them had an agenda and cherry-picked only the bad ones? Maybe the ones from another factory or a few months either way were just fine.

I can offer a comparison of the quality that was made by the experts of the USSR at that time. In 1946, almost all fighters were scrapped. You will not find traces of tens of thousands of aircraft in the post-war world. In 1947, the USSR continued production after a pause to review their designs and technology. The famous La-7, for example, was immediately replaced by La-9. Yak-9 became known as Yak-9U. Read about it. But foreign fighters remained in service until 1953. The USSR produced many MiG-15s, but kept the P-63 at advanced airfields.

Maybe the pre-war production is high-quality? There were also records. But again, tens of thousands of aircraft had already disappeared in the summer of 1941, after two months of war. Isn't it interesting where? There were more planes than in the whole world at once. Including the USA and Japan. In August, the first British combat aircraft arrived in the USSR (Barbarossa - July). Let me remind you that the British had fought off LW by that time, and soon they would launch an air offensive to Germany in the spring of 1942, when the record holders from the USSR would concentrate so as not to run away.
Find an opinion that not the best Lend-Lease aircraft in the West are worse than the Soviet ones by quality. I know that Stalin personally said that the Hurricane was not suitable in 1942... And he demanded more Hurricanes to 1944.

To get a valid overall view, you'd have to have some population of quality reports over several years, assign them each consecutive numbers, and use a random number table to select a representative random sample of reports, and summarize them, perhaps stratified by time and factory. Then, you might have a decent idea of overall quality.

And then it would be good to have statistics with a single measurement methodology. Right? You were asked to look for the good among the bad, you demand statistics. Look for the good ones.
The USA, UK, Germany, Japan did not stoop to replacing one kind of tree with another worse and without drying. They did not consider it possible to produce airplanes without radio sets, etc. Before statistical, it is worth conducting at least some kind of qualitative analysis.
Until then, you have an opinion not based in mathematical probability. That opinion might be right or might be wrong, but it is hardly a representative valid quality opinion.

To date, I have a pretty decent opinion of Soviet aircraft quality from the WWI through the Viet Nam era. Likewise WWII Japanese, German, British, and US aircraft quality.
Your opinion isn't quite so high, at least for the Soviet Union. Both of us might be wrong or one of us might be right.
But, you might go back to just prior to WWII, look at all the achievements in aviation, and then take note of how many aviation firsts and aviation records were, and in some cases still are, owned by the former Soviet Union. The depth of their achievements, including first man into space and first to orbit, is somewhat startling if they really didn't know what they were doing at the time! In WWII, they went from a rag-tag group of aerial targets at the beginning of WWII to a force where German military airplanes could not live for long in Soviet skies in 1945.

So ask about the facts, and don't repeat your opinion. I'm asking you, I'm giving you new arguments. Repetition is well for propaganda.

1. Another country participated in the Great War. The Communists thoroughly destroyed, first of all, its culture. Sikorsky is notable in tsarist Russia, he became a great US engineer. However, the USA, UK, and France are full of the greatest.
2. Records are not an criteria. Italy and France have a lot of records back then. And?
The USSR started a war with the largest air forces in the world. In 5 months, he lost the entire army and most of the country's population. He lost the pre-war AF completely.
3. Korea and Vietnam, Sputnik and Gagarin later. And he didn't show anything good in the air war. Actually, after Korea, it was decided that the Soviet AF should not dominate the air. Because they never dominated, no matter how.
4. We know that the USSR occupied advanced Eastern Europe and part of Germany. I can argue about the cosmonautics of the USSR in detail, but not here. If you want, I can describe my opinion in three long sentences. It is rare, I warn you. But I will not defend it.
In the USSR, engineers recognized Western technology and quality back then. My father is a Soviet rocket engineer, graduated from Voenmekh in the early 1950s. His opinion is more important than yours, not only for me. Something is wrong with your criteria and methods. Your conclusions do not agree with the facts.
5. In particular, the USSR is not the winner in the war, but the people are the victim. Like the China did not win either, but participated on the side of the winners. From here I can start discussing the quality of Soviet factories, which I have studied for a long time.
My hobby: the urgent fighter program in the USSR 1940-1941. About records: the number of projects for SINGLE-seat fighters alone that year is a 27 very different projects have been started! But only 5 of them are usually discussed: MiG-3, Yak-1, LaGG-3, I-180, and 185. More than 27 possible. Stalin personally supervised this mess. This is the year when, say, Typhoon, Mustang, Corsair flew.