ARR fighter types, First period of war

[i16stealth]

How did the romanians find their earlier fighter types? Also, were there any differenties in fighter tactics of different planes?

[D13-th_Mytzu]

I think there is a lot to debate on this subject.I can only tell you what I read in romanian books and what I heard from romanian ww2 vets.I read from the books (some of which are pilot memoirs others are written using military archives data) that during the war romanian pilots almost always engaged in inferiority (like 2 vs. 10 or 4 vs. 20, 4 vs 12, etc..) I never read about a case where the romanian pilots did not engage even if the odds where not good for them - this tells me they knew they can make it out, either because of better equipemnt or better training.I heard mr. Ion Dobran and mr. Ioan Dicezare saying almost the same thing about aerial fightings against VVS pilots: they were not same quality as US or german - by quality they meant pilot training and the planes they flew - however starting 1943 VVS got better planes (P39, Spits, La5FN, La7, Yak9 ... ) and things were not as easy as in the begining, but still easier then fighting against USAAF or Luftwaffe - this is how they remember things.

My personal opinion (so far) is that early in the war VVS lost many pilots due to obsolite planes, then in mid war they were forced to introduce many not so well trained pilots to fill the gaps so they had large losses again, later in the war they had better equipemnt and slightly better trained/experienced pilots.But as I said - this is a personal opinion and might be totally wrong.