How good was the soviet air force? (2 Viewers)

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NevadaK said:
I'm not a big fan of overly reductive arguments.
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Just one question - how many Russian-language sources have you studied? Especially interesting, how much of the pilots' memories did you take into account? For my part, I can say that I have familiarized myself with dozens of interviews of Soviet pilots and the situation with the quality of radio communication they PRACTICALLY ALL describe in the same way. Those of them who fought on Lend-Lease aircraft were unequivocally satisfied with the radio communication. But those who fought with RSI-3/-4 very rarely used positive expressions to describe them. American radios were installed on the Yak-9DD because it was necessary to provide a longer range of radio communication - Soviet radios did not allow it.
And many pilots expressed the opinion that the quality of radio communications was often more important than flight performance.
NevadaK said:
The war in the east is not simply fighter vs fighter.
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Oh, yeah? Where was the fighter vs. fighter war? The Soviets prioritized escorting bombers and attack aircraft - the Yaks were ideal for that. They tried to use La and Cobras more often for free hunting, but they also had to escort and suffer losses due to suboptimal tactics.
But this situation remained almost unchanged during the war. However, the balance of forces changed very significantly. And even the Soviets could not use their huge superiority in numbers, making gross errors in the use of the air force.
 
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I didn't say the Yak-3 was post-WWII and maybe you read the post wrong.

The Yak-3 has WWII Yak-3 wings. They have decent workmanship. The Yak-11 the original Yak-3 wings came from was damaged in 1951 and the wings were stored for 25+ years. The original Yak-3 was flying at least several years before being damaged, so the wings were WWII wings.

Again, you make an incorrect assumption and come off sounding a bit flippant.

It is starting to seem like a pattern. Stop it. Please.

Don't put words in my mouth or anybody else's. Use your own words. I said what said; not what you wanted me to say.

The Soviet-era airplanes I have flown, worked on, or were around a lot have been: Yak-3, Yak-9, Yak-18, Yak-52, MiG-15 UTI, MiG-15 bis, L-39, TS-11, and An-2. I have not worked on the An-2, TS-11, or L-39 but have been around them while work was being done and have been looking closely. They all had some unusual (to me, anyway) features, but were all well-made, as was the Chinese CJ-6 I worked on. The CJ-6 had heim-joint and pushrod ailerons and elevator, while the rudder was cable-operated. A nice setup.

I'll bet there WERE some poorly-made WWII Soviet airplanes. Ditto for the Germans, the U.S.A, the British and the Japanese. But "some" definitely doesn't mean "all," and the ones I have seen weren't badly made. It was widely-believed in the U.S.A. that Japanese airplanes were poorly made. But, I did minor work on the Planes of Fame A6M5 Model 52 Zero when it underwent major overhaul and also helped restore the Aichi D4Y-3 "Judy," and neither one was badly built. They had typical aircraft workmanship, even if the metal in the A6M was thinner than on U.S. aircraft.

To date, my observation has been that everyone in WWII had decently-constructed airplanes. The various merits of the aircraft can be argued, but none I have seen up close were badly-built. When I criticized the Ha.1112, I never said it was poorly-made. I said it had issues and they were design issues, not workmanship issues.
 

Do you ever have the impression that the Germans were so good, that they actually won the war, but the liberal media covered it up?
 
GregP said:
It is starting to seem like a pattern. Stop it. Please.
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I read the reports from the war. Many of them (too many!) pointed out that due to the poor manufacturing quality of the Yaks in mass production, their flight performance was deteriorating. For example, the maximum speed of mass-produced fighters ranged between 615-620 km/h, while polished airplanes on state tests got 650 km/h. This is not my fantasy. These are the REPORTS of the control tests.
Complaints about the quality of assembly can often be found in the memoirs of Soviet pilots - especially those who could compare Soviet and American airplanes.
If you personally were lucky to enjoy a well-made Yak wing (most likely post-war), it doesn't mean that the quality of wartime assembly was always as high.
 
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Wild_Bill_Kelso said:
Do you ever have the impression that the Germans were so good, that they actually won the war, but the liberal media covered it up?
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I have an impression of the _price_ of victory, as well as the Soviet quality of industrial/armed forces management. And I am tired of the myths and fairy tales of those who have no impression of Soviet realities.
 
To be honest, I don't read Russian in either Arabic or Cyrillic fonts. I was a fluent reader of German, French, and Italian during university and early in my academic career. I've read a wide range of histories and memoirs of the war. I fully understand that the wartime Soviet industry had very uneven quality standards and that one factory would produce an outstanding aircraft and another factory would produce an unacceptable example of the same aircraft. That said, I've also read enough to know that many Soviet pilots were extremely proud of their aircraft and felt they were superior to their German opponents. I have also read enough to know that the Germans felt that late model Soviet aircraft were equal or better than their own. Did Soviet production quality equal western standards? In a word, no. Then again, western manufacturers did not work under the same challenges that Soviet factories did. The Soviet Union did produce good aircraft. We can see this in the Korean war when late model Yaks were still in use against P-51's and F4U's. Were western aircraft affected by fit and finish? Yes. There is another thread currently active on this site that talks about the affect paint stripping and polishing has on the performance of a P-47. Aircraft of every country were impacted by a number of issues throughout the war.

As for where was the fighter vs fighter war. I was making a reference to the air war over Europe which is often thought of as principally fighter vs fighter as well as the tendency in this forum to focus on fighter vs fighter comparisons.
 
Without reading Soviet sources, it is impossible to get an adequate impression of the situation. In principle, books by Yefim Gordon (often with Russian co-authors) give a good understanding, but they are not sufficient.
Not to be unsubstantiated. Could you please list the numbers of the Soviet aircraft factories (wartime only) that produced airplanes of _outstanding_ quality? I haven't found any still. In the best case the quality was acceptable. But usually serial airplanes were delivered to air force units with _known_ _design_ defects.
The statement "Soviet airplanes were good" is not conclusive. The question is, were they good enough to be superior to the German ones considering the whole set of parameters? No, they were not, although they could have been superior in flight performance.
The Soviet Union won due to mass production of mediocre airplanes and huge losses of pilots, many of which could have been avoided with a better management of the Air Force / aircraft industry. However, the Stalin's system did not assume career growth according to business qualities, which - combined with voluntarism - led to overlooking of optimal solutions.
Just an example: after the failure with the I-180 - already after many problems of this aircraft had been eliminated! - Polikarpov was "taken away" from serial plant No. 21, where the I-16s were produced. The production of the mediocre LaGG-3 with a huge number of shortcomings and a completely different technology was launched there. After setting up the production of the LaGG, the plant was decided to produce Yaks which had better performance but required another technological setup, although by this time the I-185 was already flying. It was superior to ALL Soviet and most modifications of German fighters The technology of the I-185 was similar to that of the I-16. Thanks to the persistence of the party leader Lavochkin was allowed to modify the LaGG for the M-82 engine, although the same I-185 with higher performance was already flying with this engine. As a result, the plant produced the La-5 with a large number of shortcomings, although the I-185 was much more technologically advanced in production. Approximately the same story with the Tu-2.
Producing huge quantities of airplanes the Soviet Union could not provide normal training of pilots, the produced airplanes were often idle in back areas or quickly destroyed at the front because of poorly trained pilots. Fuel production was not enough to supply both operations and training (supplies of U.S. gasoline and high-octane components were extremely important, if not existential for the USSR!). Operation planning was often inadequate due to insufficient intelligence, etc.
 
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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.

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.

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.
 
GregP said:
I doubt
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I am trying to operate with numerical data (e.g., maximum speed deterioration), while you are merely stating your opinion. This can hardly be called a constructive discussion.
One more example: over 1000 Yak-3 (about 20% of the total production!!!) were not allowed to fly in 1946(!) due to various defects - both design and manufacturing. More than 700 of them had fabric aircraft skin with insufficient strength. It is statistics, not an opinion.
 
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To provide a bit of primary source evidence for the thread, below are the sortie figures for the 3rd Air Army on a couple of typical days in October 1944 over Courland in Latvia. The vast majority of Soviet fighter sorties in 1944/1945 were cover/patrol missions and escort missions. They almost never flew sweeps, and the fighter units rarely flew ground-attack sorties in that period.

- 429 Il-2s on ground-attack, 103 reconnaissance, 1 weather reconnaissance, 342 fighters on escort, 180 fighters on cover
- 513 Il-2s on ground-attack, 56 reconnaissance, 2 weather reconnaissance, 321 fighters on escort, 26 fighters on cover

And from a completely different time period and theatre of war, 4th Air Army in April 1945 to the north of Berlin:

- 730 bomber and Il-2s against troops and equipment, 154 reconnaissance and weather reconnaissance, 3 aircraft on artillery spotting, 494 fighters on escort, 374 fighters on cover for troops, 104 fighters over German airfields, 14 fighters on sweeps

Cheers,
Andrew A.
 
Soviets have had problems in making the series produced aircraft to match level of performance of what the carefully prepared prototypes did. More or less through the whole war. Situation somewhat improved once the German onslaught of 1941-42 was defended against. Eg. see here, for the 3 types that were doing 10-30 km/h better by 1943. Unfortunately, Germans also improved their game a lot by 1943, but that is rarely evident on the 'Tsagi book' charts, that almost never depict the 109FG-4 or G-2.
Constructive mistake on the MiG-1/-3 precluded easy removal of the cockpit canopy canopy in emergency, leaving the pilots to fly with the canopies open - luckily Mikoyan's brother was one of the high-ups, otherwise...
A surplus amount of glue was noted on many fighters produced, but it took a while to remove it, it kept the weight up vs. the specified amount.
Then we have a whole thing of vast majority of fighters being powered by the sub-par M-105 engines, that were already behind the curve in 1941.

It says a lot when the best fighter in Soviet service, for a good chunk of ww2, was the P-39.
 
tomo pauk said:
It says a lot when the best fighter in Soviet service was the P-39.
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At least in 1943. Possibly in the first half of 1944. The number of Soviet aces who fought on this aircraft is disproportionately large, even taking into account overclaiming.
Constructive mistake on the MiG-1/-3 precluded easy removal of the cockpit canopy canopy in emergency
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The same problem with the LaGG/La. in 1942, partially in 1943.
 
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bf109xxl said:
I have an impression of the _price_ of victory, as well as the Soviet quality of industrial/armed forces management. And I am tired of the myths and fairy tales of those who have no impression of Soviet realities.
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Unfortunately you are creating your own myths mate
 

Do you really believe you are the only one here who has read Soviet pilot interviews? I don't read Russian but many have been translated into English. Some Soviet pilots complained about build quality and design flaws of their Soviet made aircraft. By no means all.

I've read long interview transcripts of about two dozen Soviet pilots who flew both Lend Lease and Soviet-made types, and they generally preferred the Soviet types by 1943. Western types were appreciated for certain features - radios, visibility, armor and strong construction, heavy armament. Relief tube. But they were generally considered too large, too heavy, too draggy, too sensitive to oil cleanliness etc., and too difficult to maintain in Winter conditions. They basically considered the Hurricane barely superior to an I-16, the early P-40 a bit better but quickly burned out the engines. They liked P-39s as we all know but they removed the wing guns from it which they said (correctly, I suspect) were useless. They found that the Spitfire Mk V, which they did an extensive combat trial with, was too draggy and too fragile, and not really suitable for front line use, so they sent them to PVO.

All the Soviet pilots I've read interviews of, at least two dozen of them, generally preferred the La 5 / 7 series and later build Yak 1 / 7 / 9 to any of the Lend Lease types except the P-39. I can provide links if needed.


There was more than one type of radio used even just in fighter aircraft in WW2. The Anglo-Americans used a variety of types, as did the Germans, Japanese, and Italians. In American fighters flying in the Middle East in 1942-43, there were short range sets such as the SCR series, in most of the fighters, suitable for communication within the squadron when they were within relatively short distance, but which were very limited in range and didn't always work that well. Only squadron or wing leaders would have a second radio which had the long range transmitter that could communicate with the base.

bf109xxl said:
And many pilots expressed the opinion that the quality of radio communications was often more important than flight performance.
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I can see a case could be made for that, especially when one side has radios but the other side doesn't, but I'd like to see a source for 'many Soviet pilots' articulating this belief.


British pilots in the Middle East also used a variety of "sub-optimal" tactics for long periods of time, which the Luftwaffe pilots credited for many of their victories. It turned out though that the Luftwaffe tactics were also sub-optimal when it came to the strategic / operational picture. I think that was also the case in Russia, clearly by the end of Stalingrad.

bf109xxl said:
But this situation remained almost unchanged during the war. However, the balance of forces changed very significantly. And even the Soviets could not use their huge superiority in numbers, making gross errors in the use of the air force.
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I think you are grossly exaggerating here.
 
NevadaK said:
We can see this in the Korean war when late model Yaks were still in use against P-51's and F4U's.
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And what about the results? Were Yaks successful? As far as i known they were absolutely useless at that time. North Korean claims could not be
NevadaK said:
I was making a reference to the air war over Europe which is often thought of as principally fighter vs fighter
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Rather "escort fighter vs. interceptor" of "fighter-bomber vs. fighter". But I would appreciate any numerical analysis of "fighter vs. fighter" situation in ETO - similar to the one from Andrew Arthy in #90.
 

All of this was also the case with many Anglo-American aircraft. Hurricane IICs tested at Boscombe Down were making up to 340 mph. In North Africa, with tropical filters, sand roughened paint etc., many of them were barely making 300 mph. There was a similar though not quite as severe downgrade with the Spit V flying in Australia. With F4F Wildcats, with P-39s and P-40s etc. etc.


I think that is a misleading way to put it.

Maybe the Soviets liked the P-39 because it was the most similar of all Lend Lease aircraft to the later Soviet designed types:

Small wingspan (34' vs 37' 3" on P-40, 36' 10" on a Spitfire V, 40' on Hurricane II etc.)
Nose cannon - main guns were not in the wings
Nose guns - two heavy machine guns in the nose
Low drag / well streamlined
Good low altitude performance (faster than P-40, Hurricane, or Spit V at 5,000 ft, and faster than Bf 109F or early G at that altitude too)

because it had a nose wheel making it a bit easier to land,

and because they did a proper (4 months) workup on it before introducing it into combat, thus reducing maintenance problems etc., and training pilots to make the best use of it.

I think the argument can be made that the P-39 was the single foreign aircraft that fit the best with the conditions of the front and with the tactics being used by Soviet pilots. It's worst vice (being somewhat 'twitchy' and prone to spin) was also familiar to Soviet pilots who were used to this from I-16 and early La and Yak types.
 
NevadaK said:
I fully understand that the wartime Soviet industry had very uneven quality standards and that one factory would produce an outstanding aircraft and another factory would produce an unacceptable example of the same aircraft.
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This was definitely the same pattern I've seen and which was described by Soviet pilots in interviews I've read.

NevadaK said:
That said, I've also read enough to know that many Soviet pilots were extremely proud of their aircraft and felt they were superior to their German opponents.
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Same

NevadaK said:
I have also read enough to know that the Germans felt that late model Soviet aircraft were equal or better than their own.
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Same

NevadaK said:
Did Soviet production quality equal western standards? In a word, no. Then again, western manufacturers did not work under the same challenges that Soviet factories did.
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I agree, Soviet manufacturing was generally inferior to that in the West, but Western firms also had some problems. There were some Spitfires and Hurricanes made to very poor standards or with a variety of serious problems (look at the Spitfires sent to Australia). The Corsair fighters made by Chance Vought may have been good, but the ones by Brewster were not deemed suitable for combat IIRC. Curtiss also had some serious manufacturing problems with several aircraft, especially later in the war.

The Soviet manufacturing issues were very severe early in the war, but they were not unique and they were at least to a large extent alleviated.


It's also worth pointing out, again, that the Soviets were offered the P-51 and P-47 for evaluation, and they pointedly rejected the P-47 as unsuitable for their front.

NevadaK said:
As for where was the fighter vs fighter war. I was making a reference to the air war over Europe which is often thought of as principally fighter vs fighter as well as the tendency in this forum to focus on fighter vs fighter comparisons.
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Soviet fighters were flying within range of light AAA 20mm / 37mm / 40mm etc. and were thus much more vulnerable than most fighters flying for the 8th AF etc.
 
Sorry, with maybe 20 friends and acquaintances from the former Soviet VVS, I just don't believe you. And, as a retired engineer, I don't believe your "statistics" either. Statistics are a branch of mathematics at which I am a bit more then well-versed. I was in the original Motorola Six Sigma group and have written statistical applications for that company. Talking about 1000 of ANYTHING without talking about the rest of them sort of automatically invalidates anything called statistics and relegates it to mere numbers. It's like concentrating on 3 failures out of a sample of 5 and forgetting the 25,000 acceptable units already manufactured. Did they have a few bad quality airplanes? Yep.

In fact, they made 4,848 Yak-3s and 16,769 Yak-9s. That's maybe 21,000+ Yaks of the same general variety. Actually more, for a grand total around 37,000 including Yak-11s.

Many were made when the factories were being continuously bombed, day after day. AND those same factories were uprooted and moved across the Ural Mountains and remade back into factories and were expected to take up where they left off right away! All within a short time. That's not quite a reasonable request to most people, but it's what they had to deal with.

Quibbling about quality under those circumstances smacks of an agenda to discredit Yakovlev when, in fact, Stalin had made producing Yak-3/9s a condition for the workers' and plant manager's continued survival. They have turned out Yak-3s if they had to make then out of paper mache and lawn mower engines! Nobody decides to die because they didn't even try to live.

We have vastly different opinions about the quality of Soviet airplanes. Let's let if go at that and say we agree to disagree. It's really nothing to me if you like Soviet hardware or not. I take it you don't fly any or work on any, so what does it matter? Cheers, bf109xxl. Happy agenda. Press ahead in this new year.

You only have to go look up quality failures in German slave labor-produced airplanes to see that the Soviet Union wasn't the only country with a few quality issues when hard times showed up. Heck, they even had a Heinkel He 162 disintegrate in-flight during a demonstration for the Luftwaffe due to slave labor glue sabotage, killing the pilot and crashing the airplane. Definitely a high-profile quality problem. That does NOT mean the Germans didn't make good-quality airplanes; they DID.

Overall good quality does not preclude all failures. In fact, nothing will. Zero defects was a good catch phrase, not an achievable goal over the long term when manual processes were involved.

Trying to operate with numerical data is laudable, if it is available and accurate. If it is, maybe show it? I haven't seen primary Soviet WWII data in some years and would welcome the primary data. Cheers to you.
 
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Wild_Bill_Kelso said:
I've read long interview transcripts of about two dozen Soviet pilots who flew both Lend Lease and Soviet-made types, and they generally preferred the Soviet types by 1943.
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How many of them changed from "aircobra" to Soviet fighters? How many of them changed from A-20 to Soviet bombers? Could you please get at least one example of the pilot of "aircobra" who preferred Soviet fighters? Do you know the story of Alexander Pokryshkin, one of the most famous soviet aces? He denied consequently both Yaks and La despite of direct request from Yakovlev. "Hurricanes" and P-40s were never considered as adequate in the USSR, the quality of radio equipment was the most significant advantage of these planes. However P-40 were successfully used in the Soviet Navy as skip-bomber.
There was more than one type of radio used even just in fighter aircraft in WW2.
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Really?! What a surprise... And how many Soviet wartime radios do you know? Unfortunately ANY U.S. radio equipment was better than the Soviet one at that time. I guess, the situation was improved only after the copying of the B-29 accompanied with a total re-organization of aircraft and radio industry.
I can see a case could be made for that, especially when one side has radios but the other side doesn't
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The quality was so miserable that some pilots said it would be better not to have it at all! I know an example when the pilot preferred MiG without radio equipment just because it was lighter. But ok, here it is: link. Use translators if necessary. Summary: a functioning Soviet radio equipment appeared at the end of 1943.
One more. But I really doubt that you read even a dozen of pilot interviews. Otherwise I cannot explain your statements. Now please tell me the names of pilots who considered the quality of Soviet radio equipment as satisfactory.
British pilots in the Middle East
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The topic is not "British pilots in the Middle East".
I'd like to see a source for 'many Soviet pilots' articulating this belief.
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I'd like to see pilot names who flew P-39 but preferred Soviet fighters first.
I think you are grossly exaggerating here.
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I think you are only imagining it.
 
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