Soviet aeronautical engineers and pilots from the Red Army Air Force ( Voenno-Vozdushniye Sily Krasnoy Armii, abbreviated to WS-KA) were able to familiarise themselves with German military aircraft long before the invasion of the USSR in June 1941. Some had been captured in Spain during the Civil War and sent back to the Soviet Union, while others were bought from the Germans following the signing of the infamous non-aggression pact between the two countries in August 1939. Having studied the Luftwaffe's principal fighter, the Messerschmitt Bf 109E, and compared its flight data with the then new MiG-3, Yak-1 and LaGG-3, both the leadership of the WS-KA and senior aircraft designers came to the conclusion in early 1941 that Soviet fighters had at last attained parity with their western European equivalents. However, in the immediate aftermath of the launching of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, it quickly became apparent that the E-model's replacement, the Bf 109F, was clearly superior to all Russian fighters then in frontline service. For example, the 'Friedrich' was faster than all three new Soviet fighters up to an altitude of 16,500ft — fighting rarely occurred at higher altitudes on the Eastern Front.
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