THE AVRO CF-105 ARROW - WAS IT REALLY THAT GOOD?!?

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nuuumannn said:
The CF-105 was in fact a strong contender for a British interceptor in the mid 50s. A British order for the CF-105, had it eventuated probably would not have prevented its cancellation in 1959.
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IMO, in the coming era of the ICBM the late 1950's RCAF needed a multirole aircraft for both its NORAD and NATO roles, not a dedicated interceptor. I think us Canadians forget that Avro was not a Canadian company, but was a wholly owned subsidiary of Britain's Hawker-Siddeley. And Avro Canada's owners in Britain had the exact thing Canada needed for the dual NORAD and NATO roles, the P.1121. It's ridiculous to me that the same corporation would design these two aircraft without any cooperation or cost sharing.



To your last point, if developed into something that can do the work of the RCAF and RAF's Starfighters, Voodoos, Freedom Fighters, Phantoms, Lightnings, Jaguars, etc. the volume might be there.
 
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We must remember that the Avro Arrow was designed by a Brit (James Floyd, who per Wikipedia at least, at 108 is still alive!), and Avro Canada was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Britain's Hawker-Siddeley, as was Orenda Aerospace that made the Arrow's engines. Canada may have fronted the lion's share of the cash, but we must share the laurels and the faults with the Brits.

And after all we made the wrong jet. The world was turning towards ICBMs and Canada designed a sole purpose, long range interceptor to counter Soviet nuclear-armed bombers - a threat that disappeared. Canada should have designed a multi-role fighter like the McDonnell F-4 Phantom II. Coincidently both the Arrow and the Phantom first flew in 1958. One was a conceptual dead-end, the other one of the most successful postwar multirole fighters. The German Air Force retired its last operational F-4F Phantom IIs on 29 June 2013, and Greece still flies the Phantom today! But it wasn't just the Americans building multi-role fighters in the late 1950s, Saab had their Draken (first flight 1955), France had their Dassault Mirage III (first flight 1956) and the Soviets the Sukhoi Su-7 (first flight 1955). And Canada needed multi-role fighters, which is why we license-built the CF-104 (a terrible choice) and the CF-5.

If Canada had build something akin to the Draken or Phantom they would have had a winner for the 1960s-90s and we may very well be making our own jets today, likely as a part of an international consortium, like the Eurofighter or Panavia.
 
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FLYBOYJ said:
Conspiracy Theory - do yo have hard proof of this???
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I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that's valid because most of the fire-control avionics systems were used by the US as well. While it's possible the USSR might have compromised our systems for some period (the Walker Ring had compromised some AIM-7 variants), it's unclear of any evidence of it.
 
There were politicians and former military folks that wanted to kill the program as early as 1954
 
WAFU said:
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin
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Yea, right - From Wiki

During the Soviet era, Mitrokhin made no attempts to contact any Western intelligence services. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, he traveled to Latvia with copies of material from the archive and walked into the American embassy in Riga. Central Intelligence Agency officers there did not consider him to be credible, concluding that the copied documents could have been faked.
 
Somewhere in my giant pile of stuff, Kelly Johnson was concerned that the USSR would learn about how to make very large titanium forgings. Kelly's A-12/SR-71 superiority could be compromised as his bird will use this forging and there were known USSR contacts working on the CF-105 development.
 
Again, here-say.

George Pearkes, Minster of National Defense wanted to kill the program before the roll-out.

In perhaps the most heated controversy in his career, George R. Pearkes, as Minister of Defence at the time of the cancellation of the Arrow, made key decisions regarding Canada's defence system. Dr. Reginald Roy recorded interviews with Pearkes and other military men who commented on the Arrow project. George Pearkes never wavered in maintaining that he had made the correct, though very difficult, decision. The transcripts and tapes of Dr. Roy's interviews are part of the Special Collections holdings at the University of Victoria.

At the same time, Soviet rocket development had overtaken the West, (they launched Sputnik 1 the same day the Arrow was unveiled to the public) and it now appeared that Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, not bombers were the main threat facing Canada. This technological shift cast doubts over the need for the Arrow and, there were those, such as the Minister of National Defence, George Pearkes, who questioned the need for manned interceptor aircraft altogether, believing that anti-aircraft missiles could replace them for a fraction of the cost. In September 1958, the government announced that it would order the Boeing CIM-10B Super Bomarc long-range surface-to-air missile, and it cancelled the Arrow's troubled Astra I weapons control system and the Sparrow II missile program. Furthermore, the government notified Avro Canada that the rest of the Arrow program was up for review in March 1959.

George Pearkes – Library and Archives Canada Blog

Posts about George Pearkes written by Library and Archives Canada Blog
thediscoverblog.com

AND...

Conspiracies continued for many years claiming that Diefenbaker ordered the cancellation and destruction of all the related materials at the behest of the US military, worried that the Arrow would challenge the supremacy of the U2 spy planes. Documents uncovered prior to 2002, dating from 1958 show that General Charles Foulkes, Chair of the Chiefs of Staff, Department of Defense, pressured Diefenbaker to cancel, claiming the massive cost overruns and the lack of control the military had over the plane and the project as necessitating the shutdown. In fact, the Americans offered to help save the program with Secretary of the Air Force, James Douglas, offering to purchase a squadron of Arrows as a front line Arctic defence against Soviet aggression. This was turned down by the Conservatives. The actual destruction was, supposedly, ordered by Crawford Gordon, head of A.V. Roe.

Avro Arrow

The Avro Arrow: The Plane That Never Was Copyright © 2021, Toronto Historical Association The story of the Avro Arrow begins as the Korean War ends. The Canadian Air Force had been flying the F-86 Sabre Jet during the conflict – a variant of the US model – and the CF-100 fighter aircraft. The...
www.torontohistory.net
 
One more...


In January 1958, an interesting meeting occurred between Norman Robertson, Canadian Ambassador to the US, who had been engaged in a desperate campaign to interest the Americans in the Arrow, and senior American officials, who proved to be more than sympathetic to Canada's defence conundrums. Robertson opened the meeting by mentioning that the ultimate fate of the Arrow programme was linked to the joint Canada-US evaluation of the Soviet bomber threat, the rate of development of newer and superseding weapons, and the question as to "whether it made sense for us to commit such a major portion of our resources and money to a weapons system which would become virtually obsolescent by the time it was operational."48 In response, James Douglas, the US Secretary of the Air Force, reiterated that the US would like to see the Arrow deployed by the RCAF's NORAD squadrons, perhaps in even greater strength than anticipated. But he quickly added that there was no place for the Arrow within the USAF as the US had comparable interceptors in their inventory. Douglas added that the USAF was going ahead with its F-108, an aircraft interceptor even more advanced than the Arrow, the cost of which made the latter "look like something which might be picked up in a department store."49


However, Douglas then suggested that the US could possibly purchase several squadrons worth of Arrows and give them to the RCAF for NORAD deployment. It was hypothesized that this might be accomplished through NORAD indicating an essential requirement for more RCAF squadrons than those presently planned. The Arrows to equip these extra RCAF squadrons could then be purchased outright by the US or swapped in exchange for Canada undertaking to finance other NORAD installations such as Strategic Air Command (SAC) refuelling bases. Despite the fact that Canada had and would continue to insist upon similar cost-sharing arrangements for the purpose of continental defence, this intriguing proposal was immediately rejected by Robertson as being politically unacceptable because "this would pose certain problems against the background of Canada having remained aloof from Lend Lease and from the acceptance of aid from the US or any other country."50 He added that Canada wanted to participate in the common defence as a participant, not a beneficiary. Thus this generous American offer was pursued no further, no doubt in part due to another unstated reason: a few extra squadrons worth of Arrows would not result in a production run sufficient to substantially reduce costs.
 
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