By late 1941 the LaGG-3 was being cancelled in favour of Yakovlev fighters, and Lavochkin’s bureau faced extinction. The escape route had actually been explored by a colleague, Mikhail Gudkov, who had experimented with fitting the air-cooled M-82 radial to the LaGG airframe. Lavochkin’s team took the idea and made it work under enormous time pressure over the winter of 1941–42, grafting the broad radial onto the narrow wooden fuselage with a new cowling and cooling arrangement.

The gamble paid off spectacularly. The re-engined aircraft was faster, climbed better and, crucially, could absorb battle damage that would have downed a liquid-cooled fighter — a radial keeps running with cylinders shot away, where a single hit to a coolant line kills an inline engine. Stalin personally intervened to keep Lavochkin’s factory in business once the prototype’s results were known. The type was designated La-5 in the summer of 1942.

The La-5 inherited the LaGG-3’s wooden airframe, and that was a feature, not a compromise. The USSR’s aluminium supply was strained to breaking point, much of its metals industry overrun or relocated east. Wood — birch plywood, pine and a phenol-resin-impregnated laminate the Soviets called delta-drevesina (delta-wood) — was plentiful, needed no strategic alloys, and could be worked by a semi-skilled wartime workforce in dispersed factories.

The cost was weight and a rough surface finish that shaved a little off top speed, and early aircraft suffered quality problems as production was rushed. But the trade was overwhelmingly worth it: the USSR could build La-5s in enormous numbers exactly when it needed them most. Only with the later La-7 did metal wing spars replace the wooden structure, saving weight and improving performance.

In August 1944 a largely intact La-5FN fell into German hands and was flown to the Rechlin test centre, where test pilot Hans-Werner Lerche evaluated it that autumn. His findings were revealing. The La-5FN was excellent at low altitude: below about 3,000 metres it accelerated hard and could out-turn the Fw 190, though the lighter Bf 109 could still out-turn the Lavochkin.

Its weaknesses were just as clear: top speed stayed below the German fighters at every altitude (Rechlin measured only about 520 km/h at sea level on their test aircraft), performance fell away higher up, and endurance was very short — roughly 40 minutes at full power. Lerche’s advice to Luftwaffe pilots was blunt: don’t get into a low, slow turning fight with an La-5 — use height and dive-and-zoom tactics instead.

The La-5 was a Soviet state product, built and consumed inside a planned war economy and never sold on any open market, so a meaningful flyaway price in dollars simply does not exist. Wartime Soviet aircraft were costed internally in rubles, and those figures fell sharply as production scaled up — but no reliable, directly convertible La-5 unit cost or cost-per-flight-hour appears in open sources, and any precise number should be treated with suspicion.

What is clear is the design’s economic logic. Its wooden construction was deliberately cheap: it used no scarce aluminium, could be built in dispersed factories by a semi-skilled workforce, and let the USSR mass-produce a competitive fighter at a moment when metal and skilled labour were both critically short. The La-5’s real cost advantage was strategic, not a line on a price list.