I talked to both a New-build Yak-9U pilot and a Czech-built Yak-11 pilot over this past weekend at the NW EAA fly in, Arlington,WA (July 11-15th). Bud Granley was flying Eddie Andreini's Yak-9. Bud is one of the Jeff Ethell-type goto guys when you need any plane flown anywhere. True master. This airplane was built recently at the Yakolev factory. Sam Richardson was flying the Yak-11 which was previously flown and owned by Dan McCue. The Yak-11 is a 1946 2-place trainer with a Yak-3 airframe and an R-2000 copy radial engine. Both have the same wing and wing structure though the Yak-11 has gear door mods for racing at Reno (took Bronze one year - not sure which category). Sam has been racing this airplane for the past 5 years.
The Yak-9U is NOT an airplane suitable for pilots new to warbirds according to both pilots. The stall speed is 110 mph at landing weight and it does so with no warning. Sam said he would never purposefully stall it at less than 10,000 because you'll need most of that to recover. Without going into too much detail, he said the stall was viscous. Even with enough flying speed, the post stall recovery was hampered by the secondary stall tendancies. The airplane gives no indication that it is entering the secondary until it has already happened.
Eddie is attempting to make improvements to the stall speed of the Yak-9 with a row of vortex generators over the top leading edge of each wing. They are down to 70 mph for the stall at landing weight. Work is continuing on the actual characteristics of the stall to introduce some kind of warning and to ease recovery problems. Despite this, Bud Granley said that the range is amazing at cruise power. He states that he could easily go more than 900 miles on internal fuel.
MiG
