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Comment by nas | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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