On April 24, 1946, the first two jet fighters in the USSR made their first flights: Yak-15 (test pilot M. I. Ivanov) and MiG-9 (test pilot A. N. Grinchik)
Almost immediately after the end of the Great Patriotic War, the scientific and technical elite of the Soviet Union began to develop domestic jet aircraft at an accelerated pace. The best personnel of the country's design bureaus were involved in the work. The rush made sense: the clouds of the Cold War began to gather in the global political horizon. The former comrades-in-arms of the USSR in the victory over fascism - Great Britain and the United States - had already created jet technology, and the capitalist powers put its production on stream. Destroyed by the allies, Hitlerite Germany possessed, by the way, similar equipment even during the war years. Against this background, the technical lag of the USSR in this area looked not even depressing, but simply dangerous.
One of the Soviet scientific centers that began to develop a new type of aircraft was the experimental design bureau under the leadership of A. I. Mikoyan (brother of the Stalinist People's Commissar for Foreign Trade) and his deputy, designer M. I. Gurevich. In the bowels of the scientific and design organization, the assembly of a jet aircraft with the code name I-300 began. The design bureau of Mikoyan and Gurevich, according to the first letters of the names of which jet fighter aircraft began to be called MiGs, has grown today into an aircraft building corporation of the same name. By the end of 1945, which was victorious for the country, a pilot model of the future jet fighter was already ready, but its technical refinement stretched out until the beginning of the spring of next year.
On April 24, 1946, the first prototype of the future MiG-9, a Soviet turbojet fighter, took off from an airfield in Ramenskoye near Moscow. Test pilot Alexei Nikolaevich Grinchik sat at the helm. Despite his youth, he was the most experienced among the 11 first class test pilots available at that time in the USSR. That is why he was entrusted with testing a new model of Soviet aircraft, a jet fighter, created in the shortest possible time. The flight, which lasted 6 minutes, was successful.
On the same day, test pilot Mikhail Ivanovich Ivanov made the first 5-minute flight on the new Yak-15 monoplane jet fighter (named after the first letters of the surname of aircraft designer A. S. Yakovlev, Deputy People's Commissar of the USSR Aviation Industry). In the future, he continued to test the latest samples of jet technology, for which two years later he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
On July 11, 1946, at demonstration comparative performances, the fate of the MiG-9 and Yak-15 was decided: which car to launch into mass production. The pilot Grinchik, who controlled the MiG, decided to demonstrate to the persons responsible for the final decision all the imaginable and inconceivable capabilities of his aircraft and laid a too steep turn, not provided for by the design design. This led to a tragedy: in front of the selection committee, the plane began to fall apart in the air and eventually crashed into the ground, and the talented test pilot died. Alas, exactly two years later, his colleague was gone: Ivanov also died while testing one of the newest samples of Soviet fighter technology.
Soviet fighter MiG-9. Photo: RIA Novosti
The tragedy with the MiG-9 prototype decided the case in favor of the Yak-15. After a successful demonstration on 18 August at the traditional air parade in Tushino, the Yak-15 became the first Soviet jet fighter launched into mass production on 5 October. In just two years since the launch of the series, 280 of these machines were produced, which entered the USSR Air Force.
In the Soviet Union, the Yak-15, produced by the aircraft factory in Tbilisi, was considered a transitional type of aircraft and was used exclusively for retraining flight personnel from the previous piston types of fighters to more advanced jet fighters. For the citizens of the country, the Yak-15 was first massively demonstrated at the May Day parade in 1947, when fighters flew over Red Square.
However, although the Yak-15 became the first Soviet jet aircraft, the MiG was not forgotten either. Constructive flaws were promptly eliminated as the Air Force flight personnel mastered the new model. In the two years since the first flight of the MiG-9 in the USSR, 602 of these aircraft were produced at the Kuibyshev aircraft plant. Of these, more than half (372 units) were soon transferred (as Soviet pilots mastered new technology) as a friendly gesture to China, which, after the victory of the Communists in the People's Liberation War, took a course towards socialist development.
Both the Yak-15 and the MiG-9 opened a new period for pilots - the era of jet aircraft, technology of fundamentally different capabilities and speeds than those previously available to Soviet aces. After the creation and introduction into production of combat jet fighters, the Soviet Union was able, in the shortest possible time, to eliminate the dangerous technical lag behind the leading world powers with its own resources and means. The airspace of the USSR was now under the reliable protection of the elite of Soviet pilots who had been trained on the latest flight models of jet technology at that time.
