Shutting Down the National Dream

I'm not an aeronautic groupie or a science nerd.  As a kid, I resented the moon-shot flights of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo for preempting my Saturday Morning Cartoons and although I appreciate their accomplishments, I still prefer reruns of Underdog.  Engineering advancements just aren't my thing.  Nevertheless, I get hot under the collar every time I re-read Greig Stewart's Shutting Down the National Dream: A. V. Roe and the Tragedy of the Avro Arrow and I'm not even Canadian.    It's a little known story that should be memorized by everyone in the fields of science, business and government and kept in a folder marked, "Don't Let this Happen to You."  The Avro Arrow is a tragedy of waste.

It's post World War II and most of Canada is getting used to the idea of the Cold War and their unenviable image as USA's dull neighbor to the north.  A few Canadians don't agree.  The most important of these is C. D. Howe, an engineer and businessman who became Canada's "Minister of Everything" during World War II.  (Look up his biography in Wikipedia, the man was amazing.)  He talked Crawford Gordon Jr. into becoming the general manager of Avro Canada, the company that was supposed to manufacture airplanes and everything else.  These two men wanted the engineering minds at Avro to design a world-class supersonic jet.  Gordon and Howe lined up the manufacturing and money necessary to make their engineers' design real.

The result was a plane for the future.   The engineers, headed up by Jim Chamberlin came up with a design even I can appreciate.   Go ahead, Google the CF-105 Arrow and look at the images, I'll wait.  See, how sleek and modern the lines of it were?   They came up with that design when the rest of the world's airplanes still looked like survivors of WWII.   That delta wing isn't just good looking, it kept the plane stable during incredibly high speeds and provided the space needed for the fuel tanks.  The inside of the plane matched the outside, with state-of the art instruments and controls and the test results suggested Canada might have created the fastest jet at the time.  To me, the Arrow was an of the examples of when "form follows function".  What didn't follow was the future.

Between the inception of the 105 Arrow and the time it went into testing, the government changed and C. D. Howe was thrown out of his job.  The new prime minister didn't like Howe, hated Crawford and he saw the Avro as "government spending" instead of an investment in defense and avionics.  He closed down the entire Avro program including the Avro hover cars that were in the design and testing stages.  (The next time I hear one of my friends say, "I was promised flying cars by the 21st century.  Where are my flying cars?" I'm going to reply, "In Prime Minister Diefenbaker's trash can.") Diefenbaker's order crippled the third largest business in Canada and put over thirty thousand people out of work.   Economic disaster.  The best and the brightest of those ex-employees (including Jim Chamberlin) found work in the USA, moving on to NASA, McDonnell-Douglas and the Concorde.  That action was called Canada's "brain-drain" and it's probably why the Arrow's appearance is so similar of the Concorde's.  Those engineers took the look of the Arrow with them when they left Canada forever.

They weren't allowed to take anything else.  For reasons that still don't make sense to me, the Canadian government ordered that all property of Avro Aircraft would be destroyed.  The government didn't want the finished planes and couldn't be bothered to recoup some of their money by selling or leasing them to anyone else.  Parts were demolished, plans were burnt and the expensive finished planes were cut up for scrap.  It wasn't enough to kill the Arrow, someone decided.  They had to obliterate any sign it had ever existed.

There's a lovely legend at the end of this tragic tale.   It's whispered that once the order went out to destroy the completed Arrows, one pilot decided to rebel.  He took one of the eleven completed planes from the hangar, taxied it down the runway and flew it to an unknown place where it stays under wraps, protected from politicians and idiots.   The story's probably not true but it's lovely to imagine otherwise. 

And that's where Avro Arrow stays now, in the imagination and memory of a few visionary people.  Unlike Apollo 1 or the Titanic disasters, the Arrow's demise wasn't caused by "failure of imagination".  It came from a lack of vision, a failure of faith in the imagination.  And Canada has carried the burden of that failure ever since.