Yakovlev Yak-23

The Yakovlev Yak-23, with the NATO reporting name Flora, was an early Soviet jet fighter with a straight wing. It was developed from the Yak-17 in the late 1940s and used a reverse-engineered copy of a British engine, the Klimov RD-500 centrifugal-flow turbojet. Two prototypes and a static-test airframe were ordered, and the aircraft first flew on 8 July 1947 with Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Ivanov at the controls. The first production aircraft were built in a factory in Tbilisi in October 1949 and entered Soviet air force service late that year. It was not built in large numbers because it was inferior in performance to the swept-wing MiG-15, which quickly replaced it in Soviet service, although it was exported to some Eastern Bloc air forces.