How Canada’s supersonic jet dream became a national nightmare

It was to be one of the most advanced aircraft of its time, countering the threat of Soviet nuclear bombers and making Canada a world leader in military aviation and engineering. The supersonic aircraft Avro Arrow also known as CF-105 caused great expectation.

However, the dream turned into a nightmare when the program was canceled less than a year after the first flight — and long before it entered service.

To this day, 65 years after its end, the Avro Arrow remains one of Canada’s biggest regrets and it is still fueling public debate, as recently released documents have shed some light on what exactly happened to the doomed project.

“This aircraft was completely Canadian,” he says. Richard Mayne chief historian of the Royal Canadian Air Force, “and performance indicators during its development showed that it was at least on a par with the most advanced designs of the time.”

“When it was cancelled, it was one of Canada’s moments of doubt,” he adds. “Arrow still has an impact on our national psyche.”

The Cold War Threat

The Avro Arrow was a direct response to the threat from the Soviet Union after the end of World War II, of bombers capable of flying over the Arctic and reaching North America with a nuclear payload.

“The Royal Canadian Air Force issued a requirement in 1952 for an interceptor capable of Mach 2 speed [duas vezes a velocidade do som] and an altitude of 50,000 feet,” Mayne tells CNN.

“They needed something fast that had the range and altitude to intercept these Soviet bombers as far north as possible before they reached Canada.”

The aircraft manufacturer Avro Canada had just successfully put into service the CF-100 Canuck, a versatile twin-jet fighter designed and built in the country, and was tasked with developing a more advanced version.

Was a ambitious plan which came at a significant time for Canada. “The country emerged from World War II as a major player,” says Mayne.

“We had the third largest navy in the world, the fourth largest air force. But Canadian citizenship only existed from 1947 – Canada had just come of age.”

Development began in 1955 . In record time, the first Arrow was unveiled to the public on October 4, 1957 — the same day as the launch of the Sputnik I O first artificial satellite of the world, which marked the beginning of the space age.

“It was a coincidence,” Mayne says. “But a horrible one, because Sputnik demonstrated that you could put a nuclear payload on the rocket that sent it into orbit. And Arrow would be unable to do anything against intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

End of project

Designed for a crew of two, sporting a delta wing design and a sleek white paint job, the Arrow was just under 78 feet (23.77 meters) long and had a wingspan of 50 feet (15.24 meters). This made it comparatively larger than its predecessor the CF-100 Canuck, and the American Phantom F4 fighter, which would enter service in 1961.

The aircraft first flew on March 25, 1958 but at that time, says Mayne, strategists, senior military officers and politicians already believed that the world had entered a critical war scenario . That is, where the nuclear threat was restricted to long-range missiles, with interceptors and bomber aircraft no longer playing a central role.

“That was actually a lie, because the bomber threat continued and continues to this day, but that was the thinking at the time,” says Mayne.

The aircraft lost relevance, with the increasingly high costs of the project and the unstable political climate contributing to the end of the project.

On February 29, 1959, the Prime Minister John Diefenbaker canceled the program, and within weeks the five planes that had been built, along with most of the assembly line, were destroyed for fear that they might be targets of Soviet espionage.

As a result, thousands of jobs were lost and Avro Canada eventually went bankrupt. “If the UK had bought some Arrows, it could have saved the program,” says Mayne.

“But without foreign contracts, our country was too small to support such advanced technology. We were shooting for the stars, which is ironic because many Avro engineers later went to NASA and helped with the Apollo program.”

Rumors about the end

Rumors and myths began to circulate around the reasons for the show’s sudden cancellation, some of which persist to this day.

“The aircraft has acquired almost mythological status in Canada,” he says. Alan Barnes a senior researcher at Carleton University in Ottawa, who analyzed the role intelligence played in the decision to halt development of the plane.

A set of myths, according to Barnes, blames the United States for deceiving Canada about the change in the Soviet threat, allegedly because they did not want Canada to produce a better aircraft than the Americans.

They also say that Canadian intelligence analysts misinterpreted the information to provide an excuse and support a decision that the government had already made. In other words, the distortion of the data would have legitimized or justified the decision to end the project.

“But this was all speculation, as no one had seen the intelligence reports,” he says.

In 2023, however, Barnes published a paper on these reports after recovering archived documents that show a clear link between how the data was used by those in command. “At first, the Air Force didn’t pay attention to the information,” he tells CNN .

“They decided they wanted a big, new, sleek airplane, so they created all the operational requirements in isolation, largely without really paying attention to what the reports said.”

In the late 1950s, he adds, the Arrow was very expensive and quite late. “Canadian intelligence produced a high-quality assessment in early 1958 saying that the bomber threat was not nearly as serious as had been thought, and that the Soviets were not building a massive bomber force, and were probably shifting their production and research to missiles,” Barnes says.

The political implication was that if there was a diminished threat, there would be little reason to spend so much money on an aircraft incapable of dealing with ballistic missiles.

“By the summer of 1958, the Chiefs of Staff Committee concluded that it could no longer recommend continuation of the program, but did not want to cancel it outright because of the political implications,” Barnes says.

“They kind of put things off until early 1959, when it was still seen as a disaster for Canadian industry and politics . The government did what it needed to do, but they had more problems than solutions. They lost the election a few years later, to some extent because of these defense issues.”

According to Barnes, the aircraft was never as good as people said. “It was canceled at the right time to keep that mythology alive. [de que era boa]”, he says.

“The aircraft never flew with any of its actual weapons and engines it was designed to use. It was all about potential. So many Canadians can still pretend that this would have been the best airplane in the world.”

Lasting impact

In 1997, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) commissioned a TV miniseries about the plane titled “The Arrow”, starring Dan Aykroyd as Crawford Gordon, president of Avro Canada. A full-size wooden model of the aircraft was built for production and is in the archives of the Reynolds Museum in Wetaskiwin, Alberta.

Another model, made of aircraft-grade aluminum, is on display at Edenvale Airfield in Stayner, Ont. A third model, about two-thirds the size of a real Arrow, is under construction at Calgary’s Springbank Airport — but this one is meant to fly. It’s the passion project of a group of engineers who hope to take to the skies by 2026 .

Although none of the actual Arrows have survived intact, the original cockpit and front landing gear of one, as well as parts of the wings of another aircraft, are on display at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa.

Perhaps the strongest indicator of Canada’s obsession with Arrow came in 2018, when, after a year of searching, models of the Arrow were recovered from the bottom of Lake Ontario . In the mid-1950s, models were launched across the lake as part of flight tests. Other expeditions to search for the objects had taken place, but were unsuccessful.

The project was financed out of the pocket of Canadian mining entrepreneur John Burzynski. “The importance of finding the models is to remind Canadians of the great effort that went into designing, testing, building and flying an advanced technological aircraft.