To minimize demand on strategic materials such as aluminum, the aircraft was mostly constructed from steel tubing and wood.

The approach that he selected was to build the smallest possible aircraft around the intended powerplant, thereby minimizing weight and drag — the philosophy of the light fighter.

All three landing gear wheels retracted hydraulically; the main units inwards into the wing center section.

The air intakes for the supercharger were in the wing roots and the oil cooler was on the port side of the engine cowling.

[2] The result was a highly conventional aircraft that first flew on schedule on 5 April 1940 at the Khodynka Aerodrome in Moscow with chief test pilot Arkadij Ekatov at the controls.

The second prototype took to the air on 9 May, but the third aircraft, the first to be armed, was forced to wait until 6 June, as problems with its synchronization gear prolonged the ground firing tests.

But the trials revealed a number of serious defects, including inadequate visibility when taxiing, poor-quality plexiglas in the canopy obscuring the pilot's view, heavy controls, poor longitudinal stability, difficulty in opening the canopy, an excessively hot cockpit and a "dangerous propensity to flick from a simple stall into a spin from which it was almost impossible to recover".

[4] A number of improvements were ordered to be made to the aircraft as a result of the deficiencies discovered during the trials, but only a few of them were able to be implemented before production began as the VVS was very anxious to get modern fighters into service.

These included an additional air intake on the starboard side of the nose for the oil cooler, rubber sheaths around the fuel tanks to make them self-sealing, two underwing bomb racks each capable of carrying a 100-kilogram (220 lb) FAB-100 bomb, a PBP-1 gunsight and each ShKAS was given 375 rounds and the UBS 300 rounds.

For another trial it was equipped with the experimental 23 mm (0.91 in) MP-3 autocannon carried underneath the wings in external pods and redesignated as the IP-201.

The 12.7 mm UBS gun was removed for these tests and the space freed up was used to install an extra fuel tank.

[7] On 3 December 1940 the VVS ordered that the 41st Fighter Regiment (istrebitel'nyy aviatsionnyy polk), based at the Crimean town of Kacha, was to conduct operational trials on the I-200 and that they were to be transferred to the 146th Fighter Regiment at Yevpatoria, also in the Crimea, for pilot training after the conclusion of the trials.