Avro Arrow blueprints on display after sitting in man's home for decades | Hacker News Reader

Avro Arrow blueprints on display after sitting in man's home for decades

cbc.ca

153 pointsgoodcanadian81 comments

Almost every Canadian knows the sad story of Avro Arrow, yet most people in the rest of the world, including the US, have never heard of it. There are people in search of what is left of the program.

https://www.rcinet.ca/en/2017/07/18/the-arrow-legend-mystery...

Eh, almost every Canadian knows the made-for-TV movie version of the story.

I'm glad this piece of history survived, though!

Straight to TV, but it also has Dan Aykroyd in it.

So it's like the Bluenose of aircraft?

But not on any coins (yet?).

It's pretty well known in aviation circles in the UK. Three aircraft inevitably come up if any one, or simply idiotic cancellations are mentioned:

TSR2, P1154 (Supersonic Harrier), Avro Arrow.

I'm really pleased he chose to perform an offsite backup of the plans ordered destroyed...

Canadian here and certainly have heard of the Avro Arrow. The thing that isn't often discussed is how it was designed and built as an interceptor for long range bombers. With the advent of ICBMs, it's strategic purpose was called in to question.

Yeah we don’t have many great purely Canadian engineering + patriotic accomplishments which to parade around so much like CanadaArm it gets plenty of reverence locally (not to downplay the plenty of other Canadian tech and engineering exports, especially talent wise, but there’s a unique subsection of tech which crosses into government and cultural significance, which is the niche group I’m referencing).

Plus the whole “what could have been” allure to the story which made for some great TV shows and written accounts.

The problem here is typically Canadian: we looked stupidly at the short term usefulness of this immediate technology, saw no real market, and decided to cut it all off to "save money" instead of believing in the value of the engineering culture and technological developments for their own sake. Make and produce the Arrow, use it as a "halo" product, and trickle its technologies down into the other commercially viable models - this is something car companies do with concepts / supercars.

The typical Canadian thing to do is to not believe in our own ability to create novel technology, and to let our tech companies hang out to dry when problems come along. Nortel, RIM Blackberry, Avro, and countless others. Now we have General Fusion and D-Wave and other homegrown tech companies, continuing to push the envelope; how long until we decide once again to not believe in our own abilities and just give up once more?

It seems to depend largely on how dependent on Government dollars the company is; there are Canadian success stories, but many of them are not critically tied to Government budgets.

It's become worse over time, of course; we can hardly build new schools or subways any longer, let alone fund multi-billion dollar halo projects.

These are exactly the reasons behind the differences in eastern and western Canada. In the prairies we have a far more "do it yourself, screw government" attitude - for good or for bad.

You've also described quite clearly one of the multitude of reasons we're leaving Canada shortly.

RIM had novel technology: software. But it didn’t realize it and doubled down on hardware.

Result: WhatsApp instead of BBM filled the void of cross-platform text communications.

WhatsApp was sold for >5x RIM’s total current market value.

Had RIM realized the game was up when Android started eating into their marketshare and went all in on BBM as a messaging platform we would probably be talking today about BBM marketshare relative to MS Teams and Slack.

100% agreed, and said as much in a sibling comment.

Two ingredients needed : massive market access and patient capital.

The USA has both. The British empire had both. The UK and Canada have neither.

Capital is international. You can list on the NYSE from anywhere in the world.

Canada has a modern monetary system and pretty much always has. If we decide we're going to build jet fighters the government can simply print the money and do it.

I know, the fiscally responsible person inside of me cringes, but MMT is certainly in vogue with a lot of people who think that the wealth of a country and the trust in its currency and inflation are more flexible than might have been assumed previously.

I don't want to get political, but what you're talking about sounds a lot like corporate welfare.

I don't know much about Nortel, but Avro seemed like the sort of company that was trying harder to get featured in Popular Mechanics than make something useful, and I don't know if anybody ever considered Blackberry tech cool enough for it to be a "halo" product. Supporting home-grown tech sounds great, but how do you prevent porking?

> what you're talking about sounds a lot like corporate welfare.

What if it is? What if the only way to make longer term speculative investments work in a place like Canada is simply to put some government muscle behind them?

> I don't know if anybody ever considered Blackberry tech cool enough for it to be a "halo" product

Did you miss the 2000s? Blackberries were THE phone for anyone in corporate / political life. RIM's play should have been to make their mobile device management software control iPhones and Androids as soon as humanly possible, and Blackberry Messenger should have been brought out on every platform right away. Keep the enterprises under control and use that steady money to regroup and find a way to make phones that compete with the iPhone later.

Instead they just doubled down on stupid until it basically killed them.

> RIM's play should have been to make their mobile device management software control iPhones and Androids as soon as humanly possible

I'm not convinced that would have worked. I remember the 2000s, and I remember that a selling point for iPhones was the fact that corporations would let them get away from Blackberry's controls. The big problem is that they would have had to get Apple to agree to let Blackberry lock down the iPhones, and IIRC, Apple wasn't a fan of that idea.

Leaving aside the Arrow specifically[1] basically the question is how long can Canada keep up, such that this work provides the sorts of benefits that you are expecting?

Every generation of combat aircraft ends up roughly an order of magnitude more expensive than the one before (Augustine's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine%27s_laws#/media/File...). So, let's say that Canada decides it could afford the Arrow, could it afford a domestic 3rd Generation Fighter (something like the F-4)? Could it afford a domestic Fourth Generation Fighter (F-15/F-16)? Could it afford a domestic Fifth Generation Fighter (F-22/F-35)? Since the cancellation of the Arrow, the UK has not made a single purely domestic air superiority fighter, everything has been transnational. They found affording a domestic 3rd Generation fighters too difficult, so would Canada have been able to do better? Maybe Canada could have gotten some benefit from spin-off technologies, briefly, in the 1950's and into the 1960's, but would it be sustaining if the larger and richer UK couldn't afford it? (Or, as someone else put it to me once, if you want spin off technologies, why not fund those directly, rather than laundering them through mass produced weapons systems?)

[1]: Most 1950's fighters that underperformed were because of the engine troubles, and the Iroquois engine never actually flew outside of a few hours on the tail of a B-47, so it's not guaranteed that it would have worked out in practice. The fighters that didn't underperform due to engine troubles did so because of fire control systems, and after the deserved cancellation of the Astra/Sparrow II program the Arrow was supposed to carry the AIM-4 Falcon missile, which we have ample evidence was very very bad. So as a weapon system, I've only limited confidence that the Arrow would have lived up to its hype.

> Every generation of combat aircraft ends up roughly an order of magnitude more expensive than the one before

Do you really think that's a law, though? Consider the incompetencies of Boeing that are being revealed these days with the 737 Max debacle, combined with the tragedy that was Canada's approach to the JSF / F-35 and the amount of money that was pissed away on absolutely nothing in that space.

There's no reason to believe that it's not possible for a smaller, scrappier, yet reliably-subsidized corporation in Canada to produce things for cheaper than in the States by bypassing a lot of the corruption / inefficiency / etc that plagues these companies and these development approaches presently.

Tornado ADV cost 14m Pounds in 1980[1]. Eurofighter Typhoon cost 100m Pounds[2] in 2006. Saab Viggen cost of 2mUSD in 1967. Saab Gripen cost something like 70m in 2006. (All four of those numbers are replacement cost, ignoring R&D overhead.)

Yes, inflation is real, but the costs in the Augustine's Law chart I provided earlier weren't otherwise adjusted for inflation either, and the rest of the costs of living haven't gone up by an order of magnitude over that stretch.

As for the armwaving about how magically the waste/fraud/abuse in the American defense systems can be avoided, US aircraft win competitive bids on the international market against other countries fighters, suggesting that US price/capability rates are at least as good as other countries can offer. As every Canadian airpower enthusiast would know, the Panvia Tornado and the French Mirage were entered into the New Fighter Aircraft competition that resulted in the CF-18. But the American design won, because it was cheaper/better than the alternatives. (Neither the Tornado nor the Mirage made the cut to 3 finalists- the Tornado was too expensive, the Mirage not good enough.) So... where's the waste/fraud/abuse?

[1]: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1...

[2]: http://www.defense-aerospace.com/dae/articles/communiques/Fi... Also the source for Saab costs.

What's almost never discussed is how RIM and Nortel refused to compete with Google & Apple and Cisco in the case of Nortel for talent.

I've heard of many engineers at RIM making the jump to their competitors but the opposite was never brought up. Seeing how their first touch devices turned out almost 2 years after the iPhone feeling like they were 4 years behind, it was easy to see that not competing for talent lead them to have the B team in charge.

Right. It was meant to intercept Soviet bombers coming from the North. For other purposes, like air superiority, it would have been ill suited. People thinking it could be resurrected as an alternative to the F-35 are wildly confused.

If you compare the specs with contemporary aircraft (like the English Electric Lighting) the Arrow is impressive but not vastly superior. The "brain drain" after the cancellation of the program seems the biggest tragedy to me.

Well the original Lighting was the me 163 done right point defence fighter with 8 min of fuel at full gas

But what an eight minutes!

Amusingly the other English electric product line was washing machines. I doubt these generated as much excitement!

Yet the Soviets kept on producing those prop powered Tupolev Tu95 Bears and others well into the 80s, and Putin started patrols and the intercept game up once again. Think they've now been repurposed as cruise missile launchers as well as bomber. So the Lightning kept flying into the 80s, then Phantoms and eventually Eurofighter Typhoons would be going to play with the Bear nearing airspace. The intercept role was expected to disappear, but hasn't. The newest intercept role is the surprisingly frequent post 9/11 intercepts of civilian airliners that go silent or otherwise raise suspicion. UK has Typhoons going supersonic over land every few months. So despite expectation, it never quite went away.

You're right about the brain drain, but it would have been nice to see Avro continue, and no doubt had they been building Arrows there would have been a more air superiority/longer range mark III -- they did already have mkIII plans, and ideas for even faster, after all -- as roles adapted. Above all, Avro Canada might still be in existence and competitive.

My father spent 1968 in Alaska on an Air Force base where the job was to intercept Soviet bombers. The Soviets would regularly poke at the air defenses and the AF would intercept them with fighters letting them know they were on the ball.

He put a large blowup of a photo of one of these intercepts on the wall to remind the base personnel why they were there in Alaska :-)

It was his job to keep the air base in operation ready to fly 24/7, which is a pretty tough job in Alaska in winter.

> I'm really pleased he chose to perform an offsite backup of the plans ordered destroyed...

So am I. It's bittersweet that this is so appreciated now, when it could very well have been treated as espionage at the time.

I went on a school trip to Cranfield university in the late 70's and they had the one remaining TSR2 stored in the Back of one of the Hangers looking sad with its wings off.

The TSR2 was famous for walking away from a EE lightning on one engine.

I'd heard of it. I was an aviation nerd as a kid and saw programs about it and the XB-70 Valkyrie, a promising US bomber cancelled for similar reasons (missile technology shifting the Cold War away from manned aircraft as primary nuclear defense/offense) on the Discovery Channel.

Avro Canada also developed the Avrocar, an experimental, literal flying saucer powered by a single turbofan in the middle. Cold War aviation was NUTS.

Even fewer Canadians understand why the U.S. didn't trust Canada with such an able aircraft. It's destruction was, sadly, the right choice.

Any references as to why they didn’t ?

The obvious, that it was "too expensive" like Israel's Lavi program: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/avro-iarro...

But there was the idea that the CIA didn't trust Canada to not sell it to an enemy of the USA. If the Arrow had existed under P. Trudeau, that was a justified fear.

..and then eventually, having no aerospace program, Canada goes on to buy F18s from America.

I think the Arrow was an economic threat couched in strategic language. The arrow was kick-ass long before 14s, 15s, 16s,18s entered the science. And yes, they have different mission scenarios, but like Avro wouldn't have owned that space. #disgruntledCanadian

How is it an economic threat when the US had the f-106 which was superior and flying sooner?

That's a myth. The US government was offered the chance to buy the Arrow and all its intellectual property but declined.

It was a promising design but it was not the world-beating wonderplane that its reputation suggests.

Yeah, maybe. But like in tech, it's easier to acquire or destroy a competitor than catch up.

The US was offered the chance to "acquire their competitor" and declined. So was the UK.

Meanwhile, American firms were testing prototypes that were faster and carried similar armament. Those prototypes were also cancelled.

There is no conspiracy here.

It's not a conspiracy. Just business as usual where tech is concerned. The USA didn't want to see this tech fall into enemy hands; it was easier and cheaper to see it killed and hire the engineers as they came available. Acquihire, government style during the Cold War.

> The USA didn't want to see this tech fall into enemy hands

I've heard this preposterous story several times and it never makes sense. If the US doesn't trust Canada to defend North America then explain NORAD (and the 5 Eyes for that matter).

It's not prepostorous. It's what it's like to be Canada - the smart upstart, in this respect - when you challenge the incumbent. Look to tech history for many similar examples.

No bureaucracy is homogeneous. Especially the pentagon.

> Those prototypes were also cancelled.

Could you please name the program? AFAIK the 1954 interceptor program [1] was not cancelled, but perhaps you're talking about a different program.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WS-201

The XF-103 was an interceptor intended to do Mach 3 [1], the XF-108 likewise [2]. Both managed a single mockup each.

The XB-70 [3] and B-58 [4] was intended to be the other end of the stick, a bomber which could carry nuclear weapons and fly at high speed (mach 2-3) and altitude (>60k feet). Two XB-70s were built, and one of those was destroyed on a PR outing for General Electric. The B-58 was operational for a decade before being replaced - the change from high altitude, high speed to low altitude, low speed compromised its range and made it far too expensive to operate; the Arrow would probably have suffered the same problem.

The UK abandoned the TSR-2 [5] for similar reasons; the 1957 Defense White Paper reckoned the time of manned military aviation was over.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-103

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XF-108_Rapier

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_B-58_Hustler

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2

Fair point, but these kinds of cancellations are not unusual. For example, YF-23 and X-32 were both cancelled due to losing the competition to YF-22 (later F-22) and X-35 (later F-35), respectively. So individual designs were cancelled, but not the original mission request.

Although all those programs were cancelled, both US and Soviets built a bunch of interceptors in the 60s and 70s, notably F-106 Dart and Su-15.

The F-106 was actually the '54 Interceptor, and predated Arrow. It was the last "pure" interceptor that the U.S. built, as the F-108 and the A-12 (Blackbird-based) interceptors, both in the Arrow's performance class, were canceled.

The Arrow, while impressive in performance, wasn't without it's faults either. The requirements were far ahead of their time, and for some, wern't close to being met. The Nav/Radar systems, which to have "look down, shoot down" capability (i.e, Pulse Doppler). The missiles would the first fully active homing missiles in the world, having taken on the Sparrow II project that the U.S. Navy canceled.

As ballistic missiles, and not bombers, began to be seen as the danger coming over the pole, Arrow was questioned as it's entry into service was still a long way off. There was a lot more needed to be done besides flying high and fast; and something it's fans often overlooked. There were existing aircraft that could fulfill the now more limited role for far cheaper, and so it was cut.

It might have been for the best. The pulse-doppler radar it was to carry didn't come about until the later 60s with the latter F-4 Phantom versions, and the first fully active radar homing missiles not until the F-14 Tomcat/Phoenix/AWG-9 combination, which was huge. (The Active Sparrow that the U.S. Navy tried to get wasn't realized until AMRAAM of the 80s; relying on semi-active Sparrows all the way through the 90s.

One could make the argument that Canada should have dumped money into it anyway. Whether this is the "sunken cost" fallacy or promoting an industry I think is something of an opinion, but what I don't think happened is a U.S. plot to cancel Canada's project. The U.S. assisted in the development of it's engine and shared it's tech to date with the Sparrow II. But those technologies were not a good value for the U.S. defense budget at the time, and so they had lest justification as part of Canada's

Edit: Good article - http://airvectors.net/avarrow.html

The YF-23 and X-32 were losing competitors in a program that went ahead, though.

The entire concept of high altitude supersonic nuclear bombers died, and with it the idea that you’d need/be able to intercept them. The UK offered Canada the English Electric Lightning instead of the Arrow - an aircraft that would do Mach 2 in level flight but only had a combat range of 135 miles (and that’s an F.6 with ventral and over-wing fuel tanks). 15 years after the Arrow was cancelled (4 years after the B-58 was retired, 18 years before the Lightning was retired but around the same time the RAF began phasing it out of service), the AGM-86 ALCM, with a range of 1500+ miles, went into development - neither aircraft would have been able to reach, never mind attack, the launch platform for those.

The successor to bombers like the B-58 and Valkyrie are mostly ICBMs/SLBMs but also things like the B-1B (launching stand-off missiles) and B-2. As the sibling points out, the Arrow didn’t have the range, RADAR or missile technology to counter those, and couldn’t use its few advantages (speed and altitude) that it would have cost a fortune to develop.

For whatever it's worth, on twitter Chuck Yeager has said he wasn't a fan of the Avro Arrow. He didn't go into details though. He's well into his 90s, so maybe he doesn't remember the details anymore.

https://twitter.com/GenChuckYeager/status/936416735464366081

Probably because you couldn't dogfight with it.

Eh, maybe. But neither could the F-104 and he liked that plane. But the F-104 was also an American plane, so maybe that has something to do with it. Then again, he almost got himself killed in a rocket boosted NF-104.

https://twitter.com/GenChuckYeager/status/643965329115185152

https://twitter.com/GenChuckYeager/status/120470368609990656...

Personally I'm partial to the theory that it was cancelled to free up funding for the Diefenbunkers, because Canadian politicians preferred to hide underground and leave the plebians to get nuked.

It's probably not true, but it seems plausibly cynical.

By expressing an opinion that is unpopular, my "karma" takes a hit. This is how Hacker News works, like Y Combinator: be popular, or STFU. Understandable in many respects for those who have maintained forums, but still unfortunate.

Ridiculous.

Try expressing an opinion in a bar. If people like it, or if we’re persuasive, they buy us a round. If not, we get ignored at best.

Why would HN be any different? We’re all the same stuff, underneath a veneer of cheering for Tesla and Apple instead of the Leafs or Patriots.

Check my history. I’ve been upvoted, and downvoted. Upvoted is more pleasant, but we have to take the rough with the smooth.

Many of the people involved ended up being influential in other ways as well that rarely gets any credit.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/meet-the-canadians-who-helpe...

Heard about it, in Serbia, from my little brother studying aviation engineering in a civil-military-partnership school. It's rather well known.

As a child of midwest America, I was really into jets and I would also build models of them - The Avro Arrow was one of my favorite models that I had built. It looked awesome! Too bad the model didn't survive my childhood play - I believe it was broken on some epic mission in our backyard - great times!

If you're ever in Ottawa and have a few hours to burn, I recommend checking out the Canada Aviation and Space Museum. They have the nose of an Avro Arrow on display, which I understand to be the most substantial surviving relic of the plane. It's a pretty good aviation museum in general and have various other interesting planes and relics as well.

Can confirm.

This period of aviation history was always fascinating to me.

The development timeline was much shorter than new military aircraft today. Electronics, mechanical engineering, and other technology was rapidly developing. There were always several new airplanes coming out, which were much more specialized than today.

Now, the big projects are measured in decades because the aircraft are made into big general programs that have massive costs and use one platform for multiple branches of the military, like the F35. The pace is glacial. Many new engineers move to new employers before the parts they engineered even get programmed into a CNC. An excellent feedback loop for the designers is therefore cut off.

It was a different time.

The Lockheed Skunkworks was famous for getting an airplane project from go-ahead to rollout in 90 days.

More context for those less familiar with the story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_CF-105_Arrow

I think it's great that these were rescued back in their day. It's also pretty funny because technically, assuming Canadian laws are roughly the same as US laws, the engineer exfiltrated classified material from a secure location illegally. Which could partially explain why his kids were never allowed near them, for fear they may accidentally rat him out when they were young and wouldn't know better. Which makes it all the more risky.

I doubt it was that, so much as simply being "Dad's stuff." I don't really want my kids in my home office going through my papers either, and I am not hiding anything secret in here.

With the caveat that I haven't checked his sources, The History Guy did a video [1] on the Avro Arrow program that goes into a lot of the Canadian aerospace industry history leading up to the program and its subsequent cancellation. Before this I had no idea how much of a sore point it was, and still is, with Canadians (just read the comments on the video if you need some examples).

[1] https://youtu.be/F4z5-l7u2Uo

I didn't realise Avro had a Canadian subsidiary. The Avro Vulcan is my favourite bomber.

I’m almost convinced the fact we’re doing everything with the computer now leads to shittier results.

Looking at those blueprints is amazing.

Small nit: the embedded video says the wooden mockup was accurate "down to the rivets". I highly doubt that. The Boeing 757 was the last airliner to get a wooden mockup, and it was mostly blocks of wood to check for clearances. It didn't model rivets, there's no point to that.

The American economy captured the American government in part, at least, due to the booming defense industry in the post-war era. (Not to mention becoming the world’s banker in the same era.)

So maybe it’s good Canada never really got lift-off in that way.

Also this story reminds me of the F-22 story

Reading about the difficulties encountered with forward-flight of the Avrocar (which presumably is inherent in the Arrow as well), I wonder if modern computing capabilities could rescue the concept. Is there still any demand for an airframe capable of easy transition from subsonic to supersonic flight with VTOL capability?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar

There is the new Chinese "Super Great White Shark" prototype.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/16/asia/china-new-helicopter-ufo...

The Arrow is in no way similar to the Avrocar.

It reminds me quite a lot of the Draken:

http://bestfighter4canada.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-tale-of-two...

I'm partial to the Avro Triplane myself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_IV_Triplane

It's a beauty!

It's amazing how things get preserved. Information finds a way.

Also, I think that many of the engineers that worked on the Arrow got hired on at NASA.

There's a certain sad irony that it's being displayed in the museum of the man who ordered it to be cancelled.

I've always been skeptical about the Arrow. It's always claimed it was so far ahead of everything else, yet it never demonstrated it. An airplane is much more than having a few air-worthy airframes. It's being able to produce them reliably, service them and have them serve a real purpose on the battlefield. The Arrow achieved none of these goals.

To me it always sounded like misplaced patriotism surrounded by conspiracy theory: "Look, our airplane was so far ahead that the program had to be shut down by the number one superpower because they felt threatened" is ridiculous when you look at it more closely. From looking at it many years later it simply sounds like it had no purpose once the landscape shifted to ICBM and that potential buyers were not completely certain the program could survive on its own. That and the lax Canadian immigration policies probably scared the buyers as the company was apparently suspected by many to have already been infiltrated by communist nations. Judging how the plans got in someone’s basements, it sound they were not crazy to think that…

The really shameful chapter of Canadian aerospace is the CSeries yet It failed to get mainstream media coverage. Unlike the Arrow it reached production and had healthy sales numbers. It was Bombardier's second clean sheet design (after the Global) to reach market and had the potential to be stretched to seat counts comparable to smaller 737 and A319.

President Trump levied tariffs on it and that's what prompted a takeover by Airbus. What did the Trudeau government do meanwhile to protect it -and by extension Canada's aerospace sector? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I'm confident of one thing, that Airbus has the full support of the European Governments (especially France) and that Boeing has the full support of the Canadian and American governments. It's just sad that our own companies can't have a similar red-carpet treatment. I guess Bombardier was maybe too Quebecois for Trudeau to touch...

Doesn't matter anyways, from what I heard the engineering has already moved from Canada to France for the plane's next generation!

Related to neither Apache Avro nor Apache Arrow. Disappointed but fascinated.

Apache Avro was probably named after Avro air - as their logos are the same. Whether it was Avro Canada or the parent, Avro UK, I don't know. Founder is A.V. Roe, Manchester.

Same here I need to diversify my bubble !

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