[kolya1]

According to Dmitriy Loza's book about the Airacobras of 9 GIAD, Klubov was indeed killed in an accident on a training flight with an La-7...

I had also read about the fact that a planned conversion on La-7 was cancelled after the accident, although the causal link between the two events remain unclear.

As a matter of fact, by the end of the war, AFAIK 9 GIAD had only P-39s and reportedly a few P-63s arrived in april 1945, though I don't remember any mentions of combat flights with this plane...

The times when the division was not at the front were "resting" time, while not engaged in strategic operations, the air units completed their staff and equipment and retrained for the next large scale operations...

It was linked with the idea of massing and engaging fresh units in massive numbers for major ops in order to get overwhelming superiority at the time of large breakthrough attempts...




P.S. : the success of the P-39 in soviet service must be linked to the different fighting conditions on the Eastern Front. At low-level, the P-39 was one of the best american fighters (in 1943, below 10,000 ft, it accelerated and climbed faster than any other american plane except the Corsair, according to comparative tests made in the US (in the context of the comparative testing of in service planes with a capteured A6M Zero)). And most of the operations were flown over short ranges...