Yakovlev Yak-3
The Yakovlev Yak-3 was a World War II Soviet fighter aircraft regarded as one of the best fighters of the war. It was one of the smallest and lightest major combat fighters fielded by any combatant during the war, and its high power-to-weight ratio gave it excellent performance.
Design and development: The origins of the Yak-3 went back to 1941 when the 1-30 prototype was offered along with the I-26 as an alternative design to the Yak-1. The I-30, powered by a Klimov M-105P engine, was of all-metal construction, using a wing with dihedral on the outer panels. Like the early Yak-1, it had a ShVAK 20 millimeter cannon firing through the prop spinner and twin ShKAS 7.62 millimeter machine guns in the nose, but was also fitted with a ShVAK cannon in each wing. The first of two prototypes was fitted with a slatted wing to improve handling and short-field performance while the second prototype had a wooden wing without slats, in order to simplify production. The second prototype crashed during flight tests and was written off. Although there were plans to put the Yak-3 into production, the scarcity of aviation aluminum and the pressure of the Nazi invasion led to work on the first Yak-3 being abandoned in the late fall of 1941. Original public domain image from Flickr