RICHARD PAVER PROFILES WILL GREENWOOD’S IMPRESSIVE YAK-3UA
WARBIRDS
YAK-3
Will Greenwood is no stranger to display flying and has been a regular member of the Great War Display Team flying a Bowers Fly Baby-based Junkers CL.I scale replica. He also acquired Egyptian-built Bücker Bestmann G-TPWX in 2011 and this trainer monoplane has been a very popular UK airshow participant.
These two provided stepping stones for his next purchase, Yakovlev Yak-3UA, registered as G-OLEG. Only a handful of Yak-3s survive – the most famous being on display in Moscow, plus a Normandie-Niemen veteran in the Musée de l’Air at Le Bourget, near Paris.
The Civil Aviation Authority has 1994 as the construction date on Will’s Echo-Golf, so the reader might be minded to call this machine a replica. That would be unfair: it’s a reproduction, or a new-build.
It was one of a trio commissioned in the mid- 1990s and built by Strela Aircraft at Orenburg, an original production plant for Alexander Sergeyevich Yakovlev’s design bureau. Orenburg is 700 miles (1,126km) southeast of Moscow, close to the Kazak border and far enough away from the advance of the Third Reich’s armed forces for the mass production of the superb line of Yak fighte…
