The RL-201 prototype at its roll-out ceremony on October 4, 1957 (ABOVE). The aircraft logged 25.5 hours of flight time-the most of the six prototypes-before the Arrow program was cancelled.
www.forces.gc.ca
Widely seen as Canada’s crowning technical achievement of the day, the Avro Arrow supersonic interceptor was scrapped after only five test planes were completed. Half a century later, aviation enthusiasts still mourn the loss and the Avro workers who left Canada to help realize NASA’s moon-rocket dreams.
Palmiro Campagna is a professional engineer with the Department of National Defence (DND) in Ottawa. He has acted as Canada’s representative to NATO in the area of electromagnetic environmental effects in Canadian military aircraft and is currently involved in internal project review. He has also written several books on the Arrow, with information from previously classified secret and top secret government documents he obtained through Access to Information.
InnovationCanada.ca spoke with Campagna 50 years after the only examples of Canada’s premier jet fighter were cut into pieces.
InnovationCanada.ca (IC): What would most Canadians be shocked to find out about the Arrow, 50 years after its demise?
Palmiro Campagna (PC): Most people don’t know that the order to destroy the Arrow did not come from Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. One theory was that Diefenbaker decided to cancel as this was a Liberal project and he had problems with A.V. Roe president Crawford Gordon. But the reports I had declassified showed that was clearly not the case.
The decision to cut the Arrows into scrap was blamed on Diefenbaker as an act of vengeance, but it was actually an act of national security. The Arrow was an advanced piece of military technology, and the Canadian government didn’t want the test planes to go to a Crown disposal group that would be allowed to auction them off to anyone in the world.
IC: So who did pull the trigger?
PC: The Chief of the Air Staff, Hugh Campbell. A memo from his office was sent recommending the Arrows be scrapped. Messages went from Campbell to the Minister of DND and then to other government departments that were involved. The name that’s missing from all this is John Diefenbaker. And that’s perfectly normal. At that point, it was a disposal like any ordinary military piece of hardware; part of a normal course of events.
The fourth prototype taxis down the snowy runway in Malton. The CF-105 was designed to provide Canada and NORAD with the most advanced air defence fighter in the world.
www.forces.gc.ca
IC: That’s almost as shocking as the myth.
PC: The other thing that would surprise folks is how the lone Arrow nose cone survived to be displayed in the Canada Aviation Museum. There were rumours that Avro employees carted it away in the dead of night. But in the memos, it says that one nose piece was going to be kept intact to be used as a research tool by the Defence and Civil Institute of Environmental Medicine, a wing of the DND in Toronto [it was going to be used as a pressure vessel for testing flight suits].
But you could argue that the most surprising revelation from these documents is that before the Arrows were destroyed, one of them was actually offered to the National Research Council to use as a static ground-test vehicle or flying research plane. NRC couldn’t afford the test pilots it would need to fly the plane and could not maintain it without spare parts or provide security it required.
IC: Some people have said the Arrow was the T. Rex of interceptors — awe-inspiring but still a dinosaur.
PC: In terms of the dinosaur terminology — I don’t buy that for a minute. Anyone who says it was just obsolete clearly hasn’t seen the documents. There were comments from the Americans and British talking about how good this thing was. On flight trials, it was proven to be amazing, flying supersonically on its third flight and eventually reaching Mach 1.89. It hit 1,000 miles per hour on its seventh test flight while climbing and still accelerating. Everything about it demonstrated that it was going to live up to, and exceed, expectations. You can’t say the Arrow was a dud. The evidence just doesn’t support that.
IC: People have said the loss of the Arrow has led to a Canadian aerospace brain drain. Do you believe this today?
PC: [At the time,] the DND was convinced that the manned bomber threat was diminishing, even though that proved to be inaccurate later. It was looking at missiles as a replacement. A lot of the Arrow workers went to the U.S. to work for NASA, but those men were still Canadians, and they had key roles in the dawn of the space age. Jim Chamberlin, for example, was put in charge of the Space Task Group engineering division that played a major role in the development of the Mercury capsules, including that of John Glenn. He went on to receive the NASA Gold Medal for his work on the Gemini program. Owen Maynard would be placed in charge of developing the lunar module. The Arrow engineers assisted in key roles from the start of their employment. They were not just extra help.
IC: What can today’s engineering students learn from the Arrow?
On its last flight in February 1959, the RL-201 extended flight limits to Mach 1.75 and 35,000 feet.
www.forces.gc.ca
PC: That Canada has and always has had the expertise and knowledge to do this kind of advanced work. It showed us we can actually do big, great world-class technology. We could still get back into major aerospace initiatives; it depends what Canada wants to achieve. Do we grow these people here and farm them out, or do we want to keep them here?
IC: Some people say that if we hadn’t cancelled the Arrow, we’d be building spaceships now instead of robot arms.
PC: It’s possible some of the work for the space program might have stayed here in Canada, and we’d be building capsules instead of robots.
But a lot of the Arrow development know-how has appeared in the U.S. space program — the clamshell-like door arrangement in the Gemini spacecraft came from the Arrow, for example.
And we are retaining people here today, in terms of working on things like Canadarm2, Bombardier aircraft and the like.
IC: There’s a theory that one of the Arrows actually did survive intact. What do you think?
PC: There is an overhead black and white photo that shows five Arrows on the tarmac — one with the wings partly removed. A journalist who flew around the Avro plant as the planes were being torn apart took photos showing four Arrows on the tarmac — the one in the foreground with its wings in a greater state of destruction than that in the overhead black and white shot, which has an unknown photographer. In the time between the two photos, one aircraft was removed — Arrow 202. That one likely got wheeled away to be destroyed in a hangar, because it was the only one that contained a U.S.-made fire-control system that needed to be taken out in secret, as it was classified U.S. property.
The rumour that one survived comes from the photos. Did it really survive? I don’t think so. On the other hand, I’ve never found a document that proves it didn’t survive. The Arrow aside, an even greater tragedy was the destruction of the Avro C102 Jetliner, the first commercial intercity jet to fly in North America in 1949!
(Palmiro Campagna’s opinions are his own and do not reflect those of the DND.)
