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Avro Arrow: the World’s Fastest Fighter Jet Runs Out of Fuel

Ships Hunt for Avro Arrow. Armed with high-tech scanners and specially trained divers, two Canadian warships probe the depths of Lake Ontario for the wreckage of a lost Canadian dream.

June 25, 2004, Globe and Mail.

What, exactly, was that Canadian dream? Why is the abrupt way in which it was cancelled so poignant? What can we learn from the Arrow about who we are and our national psyche? What does it tell us about how to advance our interests with the U.S.?

Built to shoot down Soviet bombers coming over the polar ice cap, the state-of-the-art Arrow flew at twice the speed of sound and as high as fifty thousand feet. The descendant of the Avro Canuck, the first jet fighter designed and built in Canada, the Arrow had thirty-eight thousand parts and drew on the resources of 654 subcontracting companies.

Prior to the Arrow, Avro produced almost eight hundred Canucks that were in service throughout the 1950s. With the success of the Canuck it was logical for Avro to work on a next-generation aircraft. The company, based outside of Toronto, had also built one of the world’s first commercial jet aircrafts — the Avro Jetliner, which, while technically sound, was not a commercial success.

Canada emerged from the Second World War with the fourth largest economy and military — after the U.S., the U.K., and France. We were living what many call the Golden Age of Canadian diplomacy. Winston Churchill had given his prescient speech in which he warned that an Iron Curtain had descended in the middle of Europe. An arms race had emerged between two economic and social systems locked in a contest that could lead to nuclear annihilation. Part of that nightmare struggle involved Soviet bombers coming over Canada. Rather than relying on the Americans, we decided to develop a fighter interceptor to stop them ourselves.

The Avro jet fighter, which flew for the first time in March 1958, was based on the British Vulcan bomber with an arrow-like delta wing. Arrow’s rationale was to attack bombers, but as the plane came into production it became clear that intercontinental ballistic missiles were a new threat for which the Arrow was not a response.

For the plane to be affordable, Avro would have to sell hundreds to other countries. But the Americans, French, and British all had their own aircraft industries to support and advance.

For largely business reasons, Avro wanted to build all of the systems as well as the engines, fire control, and weapons systems. Then, to reduce the cost of development the decision was made to purchase the fire control and missile system. Still the plane was so expensive it would absorb the entire Canadian defence budget, leaving no money for the navy and army. Would Canada have wanted to continue with the Arrow knowing it meant increasing taxes to expand military spending and slowing the emergence of new social programs, while fuelling a global arms race?

When I set out to examine the story of the Avro Arrow, I was of the view — as so many of us still are — that the aircraft spoke to the promise of our country, and the cancellation to the frustration of that promise. It is also widely believed that the United States was decisive in thwarting our potential. As it turns out, the U.S. was not “the,” or even “a,” villain.

Indeed, the U.S. was benign in the sense that it did not actively set out to kill the Arrow. The arrival of the missile age did mean the Americans encouraged us to buy its Bomarc missiles, but surface-to-air missiles did not preclude the need for fighter jets. Nevertheless, the U.S. decided not to order any Arrows. It had its own fighter jet manufacturers to support and cannot be blamed for wanting to support and advance its own leading-edge industries.

The United States emerged from the Second World War with 40 percent of the world’s economic capacity and in a geopolitical struggle for influence with the Soviet Union. In this context the Americans massively supported the economies of their NATO allies. They made various offers to support the Arrow, short of purchasing it for their own air force. They even offered to help finance building the plane for use by the Royal Canadian Air Force. This was a generous offer, given their self-interest in selling us fighter jets off American assembly lines. Some reports even have the U.S. secretary of the air force saying to the Canadian ambassador, “We’ll buy the Arrow and give it to you.” [1]

Yet we rejected American assistance as unwanted charity, and a huge chunk of an invaluable industry was lost.

There’s no doubt that the Arrow became too expensive for Canada alone to support. Even C.D. Howe — the Liberal minister of everything who, before the Tories took power, had backed Avro and put his protege, Crawford Gordon, in charge of it — said in January 1959, one month before the cancellation, that costs were completely out of hand and that the Arrow should be scrapped.

When the end came in late February 1959, it was haphazard and brutal. In a sense the Arrow had been suffering a slow and steady demise. First the Canadian government was going to buy seven hundred. Then one hundred, and finally it gave the order to destroy thirty-seven of the aircraft — five flown and thirty-two in production.

The death of the Arrow cost nearly twenty-five thousand jobs: fourteen thousand people worked directly on the plane and eleven thousand in support industries. Among the casualties were fifteen hundred highly prized engineers, most of whom were snapped up by leading projects in other countries. Some ended up developing the supersonic Concorde passenger jet. Most went to American aircraft producers or to NASA.

In 1994, during my honeymoon in Louisiana, we stayed at a bed and breakfast where I noticed a model of the Avro Arrow on the mantel. I was shocked to see such a familiar Canadian touch-stone deep in what seemed the strange and different American Deep South. The owner explained that she had grown up as part of “the Avro Arrow family.” She said, “I’m bitter Canadians never realized what they threw away, such potential so foolishly discarded.” Her father was one of the Avro engineers that went on to help develop the Gemini and Apollo projects.

Perhaps if the Arrow had been less ambitious, less of an all-or-nothing undertaking, it could have more easily survived. At one point, Avro was going to build every aspect of the plane from airframe to engine to weapon and fire control systems. The great strength of the plane, where it truly surpassed others, was its airframe. Why the drive to develop so many other areas of expertise?

One of the reasons is that the Avro and its head, Crawford Gordon, were deeply steeped in Liberal politics, and the new Conservative prime minister, John Diefenbaker, had just defeated the Liberals, his bitter rivals. The way the Arrow was cancelled is tied up with this clash of strong men; it is the background to the curt announcement from the government, followed by the equally abrupt laying off of the Avro workers, a move aimed as a power play to force the government to reconsider. Instead, Diefenbaker ordered all the planes, plans, and data destroyed. Thus, much of the evidence of the greatest achievement in Canadian aviation was eliminated. An additional explanation is that if other countries took an interest in the plane after it was cancelled, but not destroyed, the government would have looked foolish.

Instead, Canada bought sixty-four used Voodoo jet fighters from the U.S. that were barely capable of breaking the sound barrier. The purchase price was $260 million or about $4 million a plane. While some say we could have bought 130 Arrows for that price, that is mythology. The cost per Arrow had climbed to $12 million, or twenty-one Arrows for the same price as the sixty-four Voodoos.

Over time, the Arrow has become a powerful symbol of Canadian prowess, of Canadian leadership, of a path not taken. It is easy to understand the symbolic power of a fighter jet. It is a projection of national force and requires a sophisticated infrastructure to produce, or significant wealth to be able to purchase.

For Canada to design, develop, and build perhaps the leading fighter jet of the era meant, and means, we were succeeding as a very sovereign nation. In building a fighter jet, Canada was making a statement — we can compete with the Americans. We can go into the world without always being contextualized by our relationship to the Americans and their power.

Part of the Arrow mythology is that the plane was the world’s most advanced jet-fighter interceptor. Even today, many decades later, the most sophisticated plane in the Canadian Forces — the American-built CF-18 — falls short of some performance levels anticipated of the Arrow had it gone into production.

So how good was the Arrow really? It was an elegant plane, but perhaps not superior. Other planes also almost reached Mach 2 and flew just as high in 1958. How has this fine but not extraordinary airplane taken on such mythic proportions? Canada is not a principal power, nor do we aspire to become one. So why so much angst about the demise of the Arrow?

A lot of the torment has to do with the way it was ended. It would have been better if we could have worked with partners to develop and sell the plane. That might have occurred if we had been more practical, if we had seen the strengths of the plane clearly without the distorting effects of national pride and issues of sovereignty. Instead, we allowed internal partisan struggles to contribute to fuzzy decision making. In the process, we have created a potent and powerful myth that tells us more about ourselves than it does about the airplane.

The fact that Canadians have this strong response to the Arrow tells us we want to be an independent force in the world. We want to develop the infrastructure and technologies to support leading industries. We want to be able to say to ourselves, “We can do it.” And we can, but we have to be smart about it. We have to recognize that our tight collaboration with the Americans is an association we can use to advance ourselves, although it also threatens to smoother us. We must always find the path that allows us to do the former without succumbing to the latter. To travel this critical route, we must not fall victim to the dangers of a false debate between rejecting and embracing the United States.

We turned down American assistance for the Arrow as unwanted charity. Yet, we had got ourselves into a project that was beyond our national means. We made a choice that lost us tens of thousands of jobs, cutting-edge technology, and an immense pool of talent that other countries — mostly the U.S. — put to use.

We must learn to work with America, understand the reality of our situation, and recognize that its pull — continentalism — is a force of nature. To survive, Canada must harness, temper, control, discipline, and manage this relationship in our interest — not fecklessly succumb to it.

It’s not a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them.” That’s a cliché that contributes to foolish, unhelpful, polarized debate. We neither should want to beat them nor join them, but rather work with them to advance what we define as our interests.

We’ve got to stop characterizing the U.S., a huge and powerful country, as a villain. Such a conceptualization confounds our ability to figure out who we are and how we sensibly fit into North America and the world. It also confuses our thinking both about what makes sense for us and about what we want.

The Arrow points out a tension between our pride and our capacity. Let’s get it right from now on. The Arrow shows how we got it dramatically wrong.

Part of why the Arrow sticks in our craw is that for one poignant moment we had the ability to be top gun, to be better than our omnipresent and dominant neighbours.

One of the most memorable moments in the made-for-TV CBC movie, The Arrow, comes when the test pilot says to his passenger: “Let’s go and wake up the Yanks over at Niagara Air Force base.” As they shoot past the base, an American in the control tower says: “What the hell was that?” Well “that” for us was the fleeting pleasure of doing something better than the Americans, and doing it first. And “that” has nothing to do with being anti-American. It’s simply about being Canadian and being proud of it. A pro-Canadian moment does not have to be an anti-American one.

Notes

1. The documentary The Plain Truth is described as “an investigation of the real story behind Canada’s most famous aircraft that also explores the debate over its demise.” In the documentary, one of Canada’s leading and most celebrated historians, Professor Jack Granatstein, is interviewed at length. He is asked “Were the Americans the villains?” This is his answer: “To say the Americans killed it is, I think, simply not true. In fact, the Secretary of the Air Force in 1958 told the Canadian ambassador that if Canada wanted the Americans would buy the Arrows and give them to the RCAF. In other words: to try to keep production going the Americans would actually give us some of our own aircraft. The Canadian ambassador, however, thought this was charity and said Canada had never accepted aid and this wouldn’t fly.”

The documentary can be found most readily as a special feature on the DVD of the 1997 made for TV CBC movie The Arrow.