Review: Last Flight of the Arrow

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this article by @M_Kresal here

 

[Thande]

I did wonder if alternate history sites represented a self-sampling bias for Canadians obsessed with the Avro Arrow, until I went to Ottawa and found tourist shops literally had giant airfix models of it hung up as souvenirs.

 

[Coiler]

The irony is that if the Avro Arrow had been built and had entered service, it would have almost certainly never fired a shot in anger (and for good reason given its role to defend from nuclear bombers) and would likely be remembered as an expensive white elephant.

 

[Bonniecanuck]

There's actually a very understated impact of the Arrow saga on Canadian politics. Diefenbaker regarded the project with considerable skepticism, in part because of the costs and the likely lack of benefits, but also because it was an initiative of the previous Liberal government. When he dropped the axe, though, he was genuinely shocked by the anger from Torontonians as a result from the firing of all Avro Canada employees who worked on the aircraft, which played a part in flipping the city from being a Tory stronghold to a Liberal one. After that, he swore not to make decisions with such magnitude without consulting public opinion and using it to judge a course of action.

This backfired on him spectacularly during the Bomarc crisis a few years later. Diefenbaker's Secretary of State for External Affairs Howard Charles Green was avowedly against nuclear weapons, and he clashed with Minister of National Defence Douglas Harkness while Diefenbaker tried to kick the issue down the road. While Diefenbaker did correctly judge that public opinion was not particularly favourably to deploying nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, his demurring led him to incur the wrath of President Kennedy, with whom he did not get along with, to say the least. Long story short was that Washington suspected Ottawa was weaseling their way out of defence and NATO commitments, and after Harkness resigned and Diefenbaker called an election, sent generous funds and staff to support the Liberal campaign, as Pearson, despite being also anti-nuclear in principle, did support continuing with the Bomarc deployment.

 

[ForceA1]

I could point out that by the standards of abortive late 1950s interceptor designs, the Avro Arrow isn't actually that impressive (the one exception was the technically ambitious but disastrous attempt by Canada to continue development of the Sparrow II active-radar homing missile after its cancellation by the US, which was essentially an attempt to develop an AIM-120 30 years early) compared to what the US and Britain were considering. WS-202A/LRI-X and OR 329/F.155T both resulted designs for aircraft which would have had considerably better performance than the Avro Arrow, bordering on Mach 3 in some cases, and yet this performance couldn't compensate for the fact that the hoards of supersonic Soviet they were designed to counteract did not exist at all.

 

[Deleted member 386]

One wonders how long this (otherwise impressive) aircraft would have remained in service, given the Soviet nuclear delivery emphasis started shifting from flying bombers through Canada to missiles around the time it would have entered production. The contemporaneous American F-106 (the last pure US interceptor) only saw around a decade of frontline service IIRC.

It's a cool story, though.

 

[Arthur_Phuxache]

Interesting sounding AH novel about a mostly overrated aeroplane. Nice review @M_Kresal!