Rat-a-tat-tat! A BF-109 fighter plane swept through the sky, its aircraft machine guns spraying wildly. The fleeing Bolshevik Air Force pilots screamed and fell one after another.
With their airfield under German Air Force bombardment and their planes destroyed before they could even take off, the Buru pilots could only scatter and flee for their lives. Yet they had also become targets for German Air Force fighter planes. Some German fighters even specifically chose them as prey.
After all, destroying Buru aircraft would certainly inflict grievous losses on the Bolshevik Air Force. But killing Bolshevik Air Force pilots would undoubtedly make those losses even worse. Aircraft could be manufactured again after being destroyed. With Buru's industrial strength, producing hundreds or even thousands of planes each month would not be difficult if they went all out. Of course, the performance of those planes was nowhere near comparable to the German Air Force's advanced aircraft.
But pilots were not so easily trained. A qualified pilot required years of training and vast resources. Once lost, they could not be readily replaced. Even though Buru had possessed a large number of pilots before the war, if too many were lost in battles against the German Air Force, replenishing them would still be far from easy.
In the sky, the German Air Force bombardment continued. Since the Bolshevik Air Force had only managed to launch a few planes before the German Air Force began its attack, the Germans barely needed to worry about anything except ground-based anti-aircraft fire. Those few Bolshevik Air Force I-16 fighters, pursued by several German Air Force FW-190 fighters, could barely save themselves, much less attack the German Air Force bombers.
The I-16 was a light fighter, with a maximum speed of only a little over five hundred kilometers per hour.