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 Yak-23s were withdrawn by the late 1950s, except in Romania which used them until 1960. A Romanian Yak-23 flown by Major Dumitru Balaur successfully intercepted a Soviet
Ilyushin Il-28 on the night of 28 October 1952. Being tracked from the ground on
radar, the Il-28 was intercepted by the Yak-23 fighter scrambled from the
Ianca airfield after it had passed into the Romanian
airspace a second time. As the bomber refused to follow the Romanian pilot's instructions, the fighter moved into position to shoot it down but was recalled to base. This was the first
interception mission carried out by the Romanian Air Force.
U.S. testing A single Yak-23 was acquired by US intelligence via
Yugoslavia in November 1953. The aircraft was a Romanian Yak-23 flown by Mihail Diaconu who had defected with it. The aircraft arrived disassembled and was shipped to the U.S. Air Force Test and Evaluation Center at
Wright Field near
Dayton, Ohio, in an operation known as Project Alpha. It was reassembled and made operational for several test flights, during which time it was disguised with U.S. markings. Efforts were made to keep the aircraft's identity secret and it was flown only in the early morning. On one occasion it was passed on the
runway by a formation of
F-86 Sabres whose pilots inquired as to the plane's identity. A story was conceived that the aircraft was a
Bell X-5, which had a similar layout. At the completion of design and flight evaluations the aircraft was again disassembled and shipped quietly back to Yugoslavia in its original paint scheme.
Records On September 21, 1957, the Polish pilot
Andrzej Abłamowicz set two
FAI world records in the Yak-23 with civilian markings SP-GLK, in its weight class, climbing to 3,000 m (9,843 ft) in 119 seconds (4,962.6 ft/min, 25,21 m/s) and to 6,000 m (19,685 ft) in 197 seconds (5,995.4 ft/min, 30,45 m/s). This plane was withdrawn in 1961. ==Variants==