Avro Arrow RL-206

[PremierBeefnbacon]

PETAMOCTO, at last a I can totally agree with.

The Avro Arrow was a one trick pony that, had it gone into service ,would have been a very expensive answer
to a threat that had all but  disappeared,the manned bomber. It would also have required a tanker fleet that
Canada did not possess and given the cost of the Arrow itself  would  have been unable to afford.

The Arrow shares aerodynamic features with two other aircraft that were being developed at about the same
time,the British TSR 2 and the North American A3J Vigilante,these were a relatively large wing area and a long
slab-sided forward fuselage area.These features were very good for an aircraft operating at high altitude but
poor for the low altitude that these aircraft  would have been forced to operate in by a SAM equipped air defence
system.

The Vigilante was the only one of the three that entered service and it was found that at low altitude the gust
response loads placed on the crew and aircraft were so high as to render the crew almost unable to do their
jobs and would have resulted in structural damage to the aircraft in a very short time.This and a problem with
the nuclear delivery system caused the US Navy to turn the Vigilante into a recce platform and it did good work
in Vietnam.

I bring this up to counter the argument that the Arrow could have been used in any role other than a  North
American  interceptor,as an air superiority fighter or a ground attack it would have been next to useless due
its lack of maneuverability and the airframe limitations mentioned above.

All that being said we did soldier on with the F104 in the ground attack role for many year so anything is
possible,and it would have looked great at airshows.

                                                  Regards

I agree with most except the end of the first paragraph...The cost of the RL-206 was more affordable than the Beaumarc missiles, that the Tories turn around and bought for twice the price of 150 Avro Arrows. It's a shame that the government at the time didn't make a better decision, just because they don't want to insult their American allies.

No doubt that fuel wise, it would have been a financial strain on the Dept. of Defense's budget, it's just sad that they scrapped the program.

Seems that the Conservative party hasn't changed much...

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Smile and the world smiles with you,
Fart...and you stand alone

 

[NavyShooter]

The Bomarc missile issue is an interesting point to bring up....

The stated range of the Bomarc is 200 miles....and the "tale" that has been told is that if Canada didn't buy into the Bomarc's, and deploy them ourselves, the US would deploy them on their own territory.

Meaning, that instead of having the missiles deployed north of our major population centers, (which are almost all located within 200 miles of the CAN/US Border) the missiles would have been installed in suitable locations in the northern-most states....meaning that the missiles, when fired, would have gone boom within 200 miles of the CAN/US border....placing those "booms" over the 200 mile band of Canada that contains 90+ % of our total population.

So, if Canada hadn't bought into the Bomarc, and the Russians had attacked us, and our 150 Arrows had not stopped the attack before getting into range of the Bomarcs, our population would have had the pleasure of a delightful overhead display of small nukes popping off over their heads....

With that kind of background "push", well, our nation could not afford both the Bomarc and the Arrow, and it was basically nuclear blackmail that pushed us into buying the Bomarc and being involved in the siting and deployment of the system.

In a "one or the other" there really was no choice.

The real tragedy was the destruction of the already flightworthy airframes. 

NS

 

[kratz]

Under the current geopolitical world we now live in, is it realistic to draw the comparison and ask could the F-35 program (down to the airframes) suffer a comparative failure?

 

[Sporadic E]

Absolutely! No development project of any sort is for certain in this day and age. It seems to be more relevant today to chop up a program citing fiscal restraint.

 

[George Wallace]

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.

Cancelling Avro Arrow a costly nightmare
By Ian Robertson, Special to the Toronto Sun
First posted: Saturday, April 15, 2017 04:17 PM EDT | Updated: Saturday, April 15, 2017 05:26 PM EDT

For six years, taxpayers dreamed of our military getting what some still believe was a top made-in-Canada fighter plane.

Others consider the cancelled Arrow project a costly nightmare.

A.V. Roe Canada Ltd. developed the delta-wing aircraft at present-day Pearson International Airport.

The Liberal government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent gave the green light in 1953 to equip the Royal Canadian Air Force with interceptors capable of challenging invading Soviet bombers.

Five Arrows were ordered in 1955 and the $27-million budget soared to $260 million.

The first one was shown publicly on Oct. 4, 1957. On March 25, 1958, chief pilot Janusz Zurakowski took RL-201 on its inaugural flight.

“The CF-105 Arrow was a technical masterpiece at the forefront of aviation engineering,” the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa notes.

Officials in the capital, however, came to believe the Soviet bomber threat “was diminishing and air defence could be better handled by unmanned Bomarc missiles.”

Theories persist about American power-brokers pressuring the feds.

On “Black Friday” — Feb. 20, 1959 — then-Progressive Conservative prime
minister John Diefenbaker announced the dream’s demise.

Everything was ordered scrapped, including turbo-jet engines designed by a Malton firm but never reportedly fitted onto an Arrow.

More than 14,000 jobs were eliminated, but many of Avro’s soon-recruited aerospace engineers helped the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its U.S. contractors launch astronauts into space.

At the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum, the nose and cockpit of a nearly-completed RL-206 is the largest-known Arrow relic.

Avro folded in 1962, 10 years before Canada retired its imported Bomarcs.

New Canadian- and U.S.-built fighters each cost about the same, or much more, than an Arrow.

More on LINK.

 

[George Wallace]

Video and Text on the Avro Arrow.

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.

Rare Avro Arrow photos snapped 50 years ago
By Ian Robertson, Special to the Toronto Sun
First posted: Saturday, April 15, 2017 03:52 PM EDT | Updated: Saturday, April 15, 2017 05:23 PM EDT

Ken Gillies handles the 14 film negatives with a reverence befitting their trusted legacy.

His father took the rare photos of Canada’s first CF-105 supersonic jet interceptor — an Avro Arrow — and its team almost 59 years ago.

Two images show RL-201 collapsed after landing gear failed on June 11, 1958, despite pilot Jan Zurakowski’s instruments showing them properly engaged.

With the undercarriage repaired, the plane was flown four months later.

“It was a great plane, well ahead of its time,” Gillies, 54, said.

The Burlington civil engineer and technician doesn’t know how John Gillies got to photograph the damaged Arrow, but other photos indicate he was attending a media event.

His dad, who died in 2002, “never talked much about his work,” Ken Gillies said.

After leaving school in Grade 10, his dad “walked into the Port Colborne newspaper office one day and they needed a sports reporter.”

He learned to handle bulky film cameras and asked questions, his son said.

By the early 1960s, after freelancing, John Gillies became a Globe and Mail photographer, covering sports and other events, including the comings and goings of political figures such as then-prime minister John Diefenbaker in 1963 — the year his Progressive Conservatives were defeated, largely over grounding the Arrow program five years earlier.

Gillies later did media work for former Ontario premier Bill Davis and Queen Elizabeth II’s 1970s royal tour.

Ken Gillies’ son took flying lessons, but “I ran out of money” and never got a pilot’s licence. He also considered selling the negatives in 2015 to cover some expenses but now hopes to provide prints to an aviation museum, “as long as they credit them to dad.”

Carrying on their love of aircraft, he hopes some day to board North America’s only flying Avro Lancaster at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton. It has one of the scrapped turbo-jet engines developed locally for the Arrows, which reportedly only flew with American engines.

The Second World War bomber was built at the Victory Aircraft plant, which later became Avro Canada’s base. 

Video and more on LINK.

 

[a_majoor]

A rare piece of history has been recovered: one of the aerodynamic models of the Arrow launched via rocket over Lake Ontario (ignore the misleading headline)

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/avro-arrow-prototype-found-in-lake-ontario/ar-AArtMkZ?li=AAggFp5&OCID=ansmsnnews11

Avro Arrow prototype found in Lake Ontario
Canadian Press

A new hunt for Avro Arrow models in the depths of Lake Ontario: This time the search will be different© Avro Museum A new hunt for Avro Arrow models in the depths of Lake Ontario: This time the search will be different
TORONTO - Search crews say they have found a test model of the Avro Arrow, an advanced Canadian fighter jet that was controversially scrapped in 1959, on the floor of Lake Ontario.

OEX Recovery Group, which is spearheading the Raise the Arrow expedition, says in a news release Thursday that new sonar imagery confirmed the discovery of an Avro Arrow free-flight model.

The company is promising that photos and video footage of the discovery will be revealed publicly Friday in Toronto.

The mission to find nine models of the Avro Arrow began in late July near Point Petre, Ont., with a submarine scouring the waters of Lake Ontario.

The expedition also is meant to coincide with next year's 60th anniversary of Avro Arrow's first test flight.

The models were first launched from a military base in the 1950s as part of the development of the Avro Arrow, the first and only supersonic interceptor built by the Canadian military to counter potential Soviet bomber attacks in North America's Arctic.

All materials, including completed jets, were ordered to be destroyed when Ottawa abruptly cancelled the Avro Arrow project.

The models discovered the by search team will find new homes at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa and the National Air Force Museum of Canada in Trenton, Ont.

 

[grappa99]

I read a theory somewhere that the Arrow was actually being built by Canada as a first strike bomber, for the US. The US couldn't build one because they had made an agreement with the USSR that they would not build a supersonic first strike nuclear bomber.

So they had Canada build one, in the guise of an interceptor

the huge size of the Arrow lends creedence to this, seems more like a bomber than an interceptor?

I also asked one of the engineers who worked at Avro about this, and he said " oh there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that it was designed as a bomber"

which also explains the thorough effort to destroy any and all docs and planes

I can't remember why that source said they cancelled...maybe due to ICBM development. wasn't the SR71 being developed at the same time? could it carry bombs, or was it only for surveillance?

interesting thread, I found this page via google, thanks for the info.

 

[a_majoor]

The Arrow is a bomber theory is nonsense on several levels. The most obvious one being the USAF was developing the B-58 "Hustler" supersonic bomber in the same time period, and the Hustler was in service from 1960 to 1970.

There is enough controversy and unanswered questions about the Arrow to go around, but the Arrow was large mostly because it had to be in order to fulfill the mission parameters. The fact that the RCAF was going into untested and uncharted territory with the airframe, the electronics, the engines and the weapons systems explains why the costs were running out of control (and threatening to eat the entire defence budget), so it is amazing the Arrow was even built and performed as well as it did during the test flights.

Let's be thankful and amazed that Canadians were able to pull off that feat of engineering

 

[Colin Parkinson]

From my reading, the costs started coming under control when they dropped the missile development. By the time they scrapped them, most of the costs were sunk already, even keeping and finishing the prototypes and using them as testbeds would have been a far better idea. 

 

[expwor]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/avro-arrow-recovered-lake-ontario-1.4793463

 

[Halifax Tar]

I do believe FDU(A) Divers are part of this. 

 

[NavyShooter]

As I understand, the "Let's build a new Arrow that'll be better than the F-35" crowd are planning to make use of the recovered free-flight models as part of their testing program to give them a spring-board in their computer models since all the original information was destroyed when the original Arrows were cut up.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200615-the-record-breaking-jet-which-still-haunts-a-country?utm_source=pocket-newtab

A decade after the end of World War Two, Canada built a jet which pushed technology to its limits. But its demise showed why smaller nations found it difficult to compete in the Jet Age.
In the early years of the Cold War, Canada decided to design and build the most advanced fighter aircraft in the world.

Canada is well known for its rugged bush planes, capable of rough landings and hair-raising take-offs in the wilderness. From the late 1930s, the North American country had also started to manufacture British-designed planes for the Allied war effort. Many of these planes were iconic wartime designs like the Hawker Hurricane fighter and Avro Lancaster bomber.

Ambitious Canadian politicians and engineers weren’t satisfied with this. They decided to forge a world-leading aircraft manufacturing industry out of the factories and skilled workforce built up during the war. Tired of manufacturing aircraft designed by others, this new generation of Canadian leaders were determined to produce Canadian designs. Avro Aircraft, the Canadian airplane maker created after the war, was the company that would deliver their dream.

More at link.

 

[dapaterson]

Canadian developmental aircraft experiences massive cost overruns and its developer ends up leaving the industry.

See also: Bombardier C-Series.

 

[a_majoor]

As I understand, the "Let's build a new Arrow that'll be better than the F-35" crowd are planning to make use of the recovered free-flight models as part of their testing program to give them a spring-board in their computer models since all the original information was destroyed when the original Arrows were cut up.
[/quote

Do these people even understand what the CF-105 was designed to do? The "long range supersonic interceptor" has pretty much passed out of history, and F-15 Eagles and F-22 Raptors perform that job for the USAF off Alaska. This is much like suggesting the Sopwith Buffalo would be a great starting point for an A-10 replacement.

 

[MilEME09]

As I understand, the "Let's build a new Arrow that'll be better than the F-35" crowd are planning to make use of the recovered free-flight models as part of their testing program to give them a spring-board in their computer models since all the original information was destroyed when the original Arrows were cut up.
[/quote

Do these people even understand what the CF-105 was designed to do? The "long range supersonic interceptor" has pretty much passed out of history, and F-15 Eagles and F-22 Raptors perform that job for the USAF off Alaska. This is much like suggesting the Sopwith Buffalo would be a great starting point for an A-10 replacement.

They don't and none of those arrow 2.0 crowds actually have plans, i was put hard questions to one such group and was met by anti-f35, deflection, and finally personal attacks so I reported their Facebook page and went on my merry way.

 

[PuckChaser]

They don't and none of those arrow 2.0 crowds actually have plans, i was put hard questions to one such group and was met by anti-f35, deflection, and finally personal attacks so I reported their Facebook page and went on my merry way.

I got banned from their page when I asked for actual technical plans that weren't written on a bar napkin.

 

[shawn5o]

A few posters commented about the destruction of the Arrows including plans, models, etc. However, in the book Spycatcher, author and retired British spook stated that there was a communist spy in the Avro program. I cannot confirm the veracity of his claim but perhaps there was industrial spys, or agents...

Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (1987) is a memoir written by Peter Wright, former MI5 officer and Assistant Director, and co-author Paul Greengrass.

 

[Retired AF Guy]

A few posters commented about the destruction of the Arrows including plans, models, etc. However, in the book Spycatcher, author and retired British spook stated that there was a communist spy in the Avro program. I cannot confirm the veracity of his claim but perhaps there was industrial spys, or agents...

Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (1987) is a memoir written by Peter Wright, former MI5 officer and Assistant Director, and co-author Paul Greengrass.

There has been numerous unconfirmed reports that the Russians had a spy (GRU?) working on the Arrow project.