Special Hobby 100-SH72248 Yakovlev Yak-23 Flora Red&White Stars 1:72

The Yakovlev Yak-23 (Russian: Яковлев Як-23; USAF/DoD reporting name Type 28, 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. It was not built in large numbers as it was inferior in performance to the swept-wing Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15. Many Yak-23s were exported to the Warsaw Pact nations and remained in service for most of the 1950s, although some were still in use a decade later.

The first aircraft were produced in a factory in Tbilisi in October 1949. In late 1949 they entered Soviet air force service. The Yak-23 was quickly replaced in the Soviet service with the more complicated swept-wing MiG-15, which offered superior performance. In all, only 316 Yak-23 aircraft were built before production ended in 1951. Apart from the fighter there were two trainer versions of the Yak-23 which were built in small numbers. The Yak-23UTI two-seat trainer which appears to have had the unusual arrangement of having the instructor seated in front of the student, and the Yak-23DC trainer which was produced in Romania.

Small numbers of Yak-23s were exported to Czechoslovakia (20 from 1949, named S-101), Bulgaria (from 1949), Poland (about 100, from 1950), Romania (62, from 1951). Poland and Czechoslovakia acquired licenses for the aircraft, but built the superior MiG-15 instead. Yak-23s were withdrawn by the late 1950s, except in Romania which used them for another decade.