Destruction of a dream

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This article was published 02/02/2019 (2440 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Over the loudspeakers at the Avro Canada plants in Ontario, the morning shift workers who were finishing their work heard company president John L. Plant announce the end of the Avro Arrow. Everyone there that day remembered the sombre tone of the “Black Friday” message, but couldn’t recall the exact words.

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had sealed the fate of the project in a speech at the House of Commons. The printout on the company teletype machine was succinct, but clear. It stated, in part, “Formal notice of termination is being given now to the contractor.” In an instant, 15,000 employees were laid off, as were 600 sub-contractors in the Avro Arrow parts and supply chain. As far away as Bristol Aerospace in Winnipeg, where the Arrow tail cone was produced, six workers were released. An estimated 30,000 employees lost their jobs due to the Avro Arrow’s cancellation. The date was Friday, Feb. 20, 1959, forever known in Canada’s aviation lexicon as “Black Friday.”

From England, Sir Roy Dobson, the head of the Hawker-Siddeley Group, made a last ditch effort to save what he could of the Canadian offspring of the aeronautic giant. The Arrow had always been a high-risk project. In 1957, as the company was celebrating the rollout of the first Arrow, the “Minister of Everything” C.D. Howe had begun to have serious reservations about the viability of the program he had championed from its start in 1953. In the House of Commons, he said the massive outlay of funds had “given him the shudders.”

After years of research, the rollout of the first Avro Arrow had been expected to dominate the headlines, but at the precise moment the rollout ceremony ended, high in the heavens, a silvery globe blinked a steady mechanical signature to its launch headquarters in the nether regions of Soviet Central Asia. Sputnik had just completed its first orbit of Earth. Its launch heralded an escalating Soviet missile program, brought to the forefront by the successes of the Soviet space program. The Avro Arrow’s raison d’etre had been to counter a Soviet bomber attack, but it now became clear that nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) would be the real threat.

In the wake of the layoffs at Avro, the gigantic facilities at the aircraft and engine divisions were empty by the weekend. The five completed Arrows sat forlornly outside the flight test hangar. Inside the factory, the partially assembled fleet of fighters was abandoned in Assembly Bay 3. The date Feb. 23,1959 marked the 50th anniversary of the first powered flight in Canada. All official celebrations pointedly left out references to the Avro Arrow and the commemorative stamp issued by the post office.

A skeleton crew of maintenance and security staff was recalled from the massive list of layoffs. For the next few weeks, they roamed the plants, furtively casting a glance at each other and wondering how long they would retain even these jobs. In April 1959, another crew moved into the Avro plant. A squad of armed forces personnel swept through the offices of the Avro Company, collecting all records of the CF-105 Arrow including blueprints, photographs, models, and films. Avro Aircraft general manager Fred Smye, whose time dated back to Victory Aircraft, the company’s wartime antecedent, learned they were operating under a sweeping directive to destroy all sensitive material pertaining to the project, including all aircraft that had been completed as well as the jigs and tools in the factory. The few remaining employees realized what was happening; some workers stuffed blueprints into lunch boxes and walked out of the factory, right under the noses of the security staff.

Avro mechanic Lou McPherson was part of a team of Avro technicians who began removing components from the group of test aircraft. He used an arc welder to cut the nose cone off RL-201. “It just broke me up to do it. I hated the idea of cutting up this dream we all had. But we had to do it.”

Smye had done his best to intercede with the newly elected Conservative prime minister in 1957 when the project had been under review, but the bull-headed and inebriated president, Crawford Gordon Jr. had stormed into Diefenbaker’s office, demanding that the Arrow continue. Slamming his fist on the prime minister’s desk, he screamed out his demands. Whatever could be said about Diefenbaker, he was not a coward and certainly would not back down in the face of a swaggering bully. It may not have been the death knell for the Arrow, but any hope to save a former Liberal government’s “prestige” project, was dashed.

The public perception of the Avro Arrow was decidedly mixed. To the people in the industrial heartland of Ontario, where aerospace and aviation industries were vital components of the economy, any threats to their well-being were felt acutely. To the rest of the country, if opinions could be judged by newspaper headlines or letters to the editors, there was very little support for an expensive and risky high-tech project such as the Avro Arrow. By 1958, the federal government had already invested in the Bomarc missile system, albeit it turned out to be a colossal failure.

Throughout its genesis, the Royal Canadian Air Force had placed nearly impossible demands on the company to create a superior interceptor that could fly faster and higher, constantly changing the operational and technological specifications. It was a given that any new aviation weapons system would be waylaid by incorporation of new technology including “fly-by-wire” controls, and the use of exotic materials such as titanium, with a new and untested power plant and integrated “buried” weapons system, the CF-105 Arrow would ultimately never fly with its definitive avionics, weapons or engine, but did it fly.

On its seventh test flight, on April 18, 1958, Avro Aircraft test pilot Janusz “Zura” Zurakowski intended to fly RL-201, the first Arrow, faster and higher than ever before. Company orders were never to use full power, but during this test flight, without using full throttle, Zurakowski had recorded Mach 1.52 at 50,000 feet while still climbing. He wrote later, “The incredible potential of the Avro Arrow was just beginning to be fulfilled.”

Cancellation of the Avro Arrow and its Orenda Iroquois quashed any chances for foreign sales, although the Royal Air Force had evinced interest before the British Defence White Paper of 1957 resulted in the cancellation of all “manned aircraft” projects. Company documents relate to efforts by both the United States Air Force and the Royal Aircraft Establishment to retain the completed test aircraft but by April, the Lax Brothers Scrapyard in Hamilton purchased the remains of the Arrow project from Crown Assets after bidding $300,000 for the lot — airplanes, jigs and tools, and any related fixtures. Demolition work was done rapidly behind closed doors. Due to their unfamiliarity with aircraft, the salvage crew had taken a wrecking ball that clanged off a hardened section of a fuselage, bouncing straight back and nearly hitting the operator. Blow torches were no better as the exotic materials found in the aircraft, such as magnesium and titanium, would prove lethal if ignited. The workers settled on axes and saws to crudely dismember the airframes. The jigs and tooling inside the plant were cut apart with acetylene torches.

An intriguing mystery remains concerning the midnight theft of RL-206, the first Avro Arrow Mk.2’s cockpit and nose section. Dr. John Young from the Aerospace Medical Centre at RCAF Downsview engineered the audacious plot. Commandeering a flatbed trailer, a small crew loaded and transported the Arrow parts across town to a site specially prepared in the centre. Once the parts were stored in the corner room, it was sealed off with a concrete block that was painted to match the surrounding walls. The last remains of the Arrow were kept hidden until late in the 1960s, when they appeared mysteriously in the storage compound of RCAF Trenton. Or at least that’s how the story goes. Like much of the Avro Arrow lore, there is a hint of truth wrapped up in an enigma.

The cockpit of the first Mk.2 Arrow actually served as high-altitude chamber for a number of years at the Institute for Aviation Medicine at RCAF Downsview, where RCAF pilots were subjected to simulated conditions up to 50,000 feet altitude in a low-pressure environment. Upon its belated discovery in RCAF storage, RL-206 was transferred to the aeronautical collection of the National Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa. Today, along with the outboard wings of RL-203, the sole remnants of RL-206 are on display in the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Rockliffe, Ont.

Within moments of the Avro Arrow’s cancellation, all the employees of the once-great company were unemployed. Most of the nearly 15,000 employees of the Avro and Orenda factories would never come back. Many of them wouldn’t find a job in aviation again. Recruiters from prominent aerospace companies flocked to Toronto to snag the cream of the Avro technical and engineering staff. The most brazen headhunters set up shop in Avro’s parking lots, inviting scores of Avroites to pack up and head to the United Kingdom and the United States. Most recruitment took place at the North York Hotel in downtown Toronto, where representatives from Lockheed, Boeing, North American Rockwell, and Bell were headquartered. Jim Flloyd, vice-president of engineering, returned to England to work for Hawker-Siddeley on an advanced supersonic transport, leading to BAC Concorde supersonic airliner.

One of the greatest coups for recruiters was the hiring of aerodynamist Jim Chamberlin and 25 Avro Arrow engineers for the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Chamberlin headed up the engineering department on the Mercury and Gemini Projects before developing the lunar orbit mission of Project Apollo. All of the former Avro engineers made important contributions to NASA: R. Bryan Erb helped develop the Apollo heat shield; Owen Maynard became chief of the systems engineering division at Apollo; John Hodge, Frederick Matthews, and Tex Roberts ran mission control; Rodney Rose was in mission planning, along with Peter Armitage, who was involved in the recovery systems for Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. Known as the “Avro group,” the influence of this large engineering group from Avro has been compared to that of Werner von Braun’s initial team of German rocket scientists recruited after the Second World War.

In the wake of Black Friday, a reappraisal of the research and development at Avro Canada was discouraging. None of the work would generate new projects. The Avro Project Research Group would, however, provide tantalizing hints of future concepts with investigations into purely theoretical research for both military and civil applications, including building the Avrocar “flying saucer” for the U.S. military. It has been estimated that more than 70 per cent of all industrial research and development in Canada throughout the 1950s had been carried out by A.V. Roe Canada.

The final work in the nearly empty Avro Aircraft and Orenda plants at Malton was manufacturing steel pots and pans, a humiliating end for Canada’s once-booming aviation giant, the birthplace of the Avro Jetliner, CF-100 fighter, and the Avro Arrow. In recent years, the saga of the Avro Arrow has taken on mythic proportions. A cottage industry has materialized with books, movies, and a stage play about the Arrow. A 1997 television mini-series, a joint production of Winnipeg’s John Aaron Productions and Tapestry Films and The Film Works of Toronto, served to stir the most passionate debate on the controversial aspects of the Arrow saga. Even though the reasons for cancellation remain debatable, there was almost universal revulsion for the decision to destroy every aspect of the Arrow project.

Canadian military aircraft procurement eventually recovered with a greater reliance on licence-built weapons, but the immediate aftershock of the Arrow cancellation was a brain drain, the loss of the many skilled and innovative technicians and scientists who worked on the Avro Arrow. Today, the Canadian aviation industry has morphed into a commercial entity, and remains one of global import with Bombardier Aerospace recreated out of the remains of aerospace companies of the 1960s. Was it too expensive? Yes. Was it overtaken by events? Yes, and in the end, the Arrow was simply a “nuts and bolts” project, but it was the dream that was lost and those who almost made it happen.

About the author: Bill Zuk, historian, author and filmmaker, has written extensively about Canadian aviation, The Avro Arrow Story (2006) and Avrocar: Canada’s Flying Saucer (2001). Bill’s interest in Canadian aviation has been realized in his work as a director of the Air Cadet League of Canada (Manitoba), director of the Canadian Aviation Historical Society, Associate Historian of the Royal Canadian Air Force, as well as other associations related to history and literacy. He has also written extensively on Canadian aviation and served as editor of the trade journal Manitoba Aviation (formerly Western Canada Aviation & Aerospace).