The Soviet Union entered the war desperately short of aviation-grade aluminium, so its fighter designers leaned on what they had in abundance: wood. The LaGG-3 and the La-5/La-7 that grew from it used delta-drevesina (“delta wood”) — birch plywood impregnated with resin and compressed into a tough, fire-resistant material — for much of the structure, with fabric-covered control surfaces. The approach made the fighters cheap and easy to mass-produce in factories staffed largely by unskilled labour, and it kept scarce metal for engines and other aircraft.

As the aluminium supply eased later in the war, Lavochkin worked metal back into the design — notably metal wing spars on the La-7 — which cut weight and improved strength. But the La-7 remained, to the end, a substantially wooden aeroplane. Its wartime record is a reminder that a fighter’s materials matter less than how well the whole package is matched to the fight it has to win.

Most of the Luftwaffe’s single-seat fighters on the Eastern Front used liquid-cooled inline engines whose radiators and coolant lines were a battle-damage weak point. The La-7’s ASh-82FN radial had no such plumbing: an air-cooled engine could keep running with cylinders shot out, a real advantage in the low-level, close-range brawls typical of the front. Fuel injection (the “FN”) let it perform manoeuvres that would starve a carburetted engine, and its power-to-weight suited a light fighter optimised for the thick air below about 5,000 metres. The trade was drag and forward view over a slim inline — a price the Lavochkin design absorbed well.

Standard La-7s were armed with two synchronised 20 mm ShVAK cannon firing through the propeller arc — lighter than some rivals but concentrated on the centreline, which made aiming simple and hits telling. A three-cannon variant armed with the newer 20 mm Berezin B-20 was produced in more limited numbers, boosting weight of fire at some cost in complexity. Sources differ on exactly how many three-gun aircraft were built, so the type is best described as carrying two to three 20 mm cannon depending on the batch.

The La-7 was a Soviet wartime state product, built to a central plan and accounted for in rubles and labour-hours rather than sold on any open dollar market. No meaningful flyaway unit price or cost-per-flight-hour figure exists in the public record, and any precise dollar number attached to the type should be treated as a modern estimate rather than a sourced fact. What the record does show is the design intent: a fighter cheap and simple enough to build in the thousands from wood, at a time when every ton of aluminium was needed elsewhere.