The Carnival of Space #104 is up at Mang’s Bat Page. He starts it with a brief history of the Canadian Arrow jet, which I’ve heard about, but don’t all that much about. Interesting. Anyway, as usual, lots of spacey goodness there.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
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May 26th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
The Avro Arrow was a marvel of Aerospace engineering. A fighter jet, that even today would give enemies a good run for their money! Too bad the the Diefenbaker Gov’t canceled the project.
May 26th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
The CBC made for TV movie “The Arrow” was quite a good bit of TV and infotainment about the Avro Arrow.
May 26th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Michael has stated the most common story about the Avro Arrow. Of course, no one really knows if it is true or not, as the project was discontinued before the plane went into production. The only models on which to judge were the prototype test planes, which were scrapped. There are those who say the plane was not as wonderous as the hype would have you believe. In fact, I have heard that one of the original test pilots called the plane unflyable.
May 26th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
There are many stories around the Arrow and much opinion.
Although Diefenbaker dropped the axe, there are no end of suspects who put its head on the block including figures in the Canadian Forces, and the previous Liberal government.
The plane was a high altitude sprinter and a fine one, but wouldn’t give modern fighter aircraft a run for its money especially at low altitude. I has been compared with planes 15-20 years younger. It’s production timeline was only slightly delayed behind that of the F4 Phantom II. The mk2 had more power than the F14 Tomcat. Had it entered service and found a role it likely would have flown into the 1980s or longer.
I hadn’t heard that the plane was unflyable, in fact I’d heard the opposite. The test pilots knew that “they wouldn’t let her fly” the summer before the cancellation. While these points are hearsay to me, I knew at least one person who could have testified to this.
I believe the flight reports were made public and have been published so the flyablity might be verifable.
But the point is well taken, the project was unfinished and there were some problems that were still being worked out. These included the new engines. Insurmountable. I doubt. But one of the reasons the project was cancelled was budget overruns.
May 26th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
@Phil its Mang’s Bat Page – not cave
May 26th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
The Arrow would have been a great plane, but it needed way too much money to get all its parts working- new airframe, new engine, new air-to-air missile, new fire control radar. No aerospace company in the world, now or then, could have managed all of that without SERIOUS cost overruns. The movie is pretty cool, but the screenwriters have one lone guy inventing just about every innovation in supersonic aerodynamics all by himself. Not likely. Beautiful plane, though. One of the Apollo flight directors, Glynn Lunney, was a refugee from Avro’s shutdown- pretty fair engineer, I’d say.
May 26th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Anyone else getting a Templeton Foundation ad in the top right? Ew.
May 26th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
I’m sorry everyone but does anyone know Phil’s email? There’s something I would really like to show him.
It’s about a series of films that could come out, about astronomy.
May 26th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Oops! Fixed it.
May 26th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
João Pedro Says: “does anyone know Phil’s email? There’s something I would really like to show him.”
I can’t give it to you, but I could forward your message to him. No guarantee he’ll be able to reply.
- Jack
May 27th, 2009 at 12:21 am
That’s almost like the story of the Tucker automobile company.
The specs on the CF-105 reminded me of the MiG-25 and, sure enough, the Arrow was indeed influential on that and other interceptors in the decades ahead:
http://www.globalaircraft.org/planes/cf-105_avro_arrow.pl
May 27th, 2009 at 8:38 am
To Jack:
It’s ok if he can’t reply. Could you give me your email?
I understand if you can’t just dangle the e-mail here. Haha!
I just feel like posting it here would be out of topic.