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Comment by NeedMoreTea | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Two ingredients needed : massive market access and patient capital.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

> 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.

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