Interesting. I was unaware of the Avro Arrow, or that Canada had developed an advanced supersonic interceptor. Have just read the Wikipedia entry and it describes the cancellation of the project, together with plans, tooling and the planes that had been built all to be destroyed. Similar to events which happened in Britain when expensive aircraft programs were cancelled just as or just after they started to show results. Couldn't find reference to fly-by-wire apart from the Stability Augmentation System.
I recall somebody who worked in the British defence industry during the cold war talking about manned aircraft passing in and then out of favour with successive Governments, with project being cancelled then resurrected. 'We were in, then out, then in again - it was more of a boat race than a defence policy.'
Yup - the AVRO Canada
Arrow was
very hot-stuff in its day and the Orenda
Iroquois engine, which would have powered the fully developed Mk-2, was just as revolutionary. The
Iroquois used titanium extensively and had been tested on the tail-end of a Boeing B47 loaned to Orenda by the USAF. Apparently, the B47 could fly on the power of the
Iroquois alone. It had an engine thrust to weight ratio of 5:1 which was far in excess of any other engine of the day.
Sadly, the
Iroquois engine had just been mated to the first
Arrow Mk. 2 airframe and the airplane was due to fly just a few days after the cancellation. On that day - everyone at AVRO and Orenda in Toronto was laid-off and many key engineers went to the US to work on the NASA space program and to various a/c companies in the US. All of the Arrow Mk.1 and Mk.2 aircraft and all of the Orenda
Iroquois engines were cut-up with torches on the ramp at the plants although at least one
Iroquois engine and the nose section of one Arrow did survive this act of industrial vandalism and are on display at the National Aviation Museum in Ottawa.
I know a number of men who are very distinguished, professional and polite gentlemen in their 80s-90s who were on the
Arrow and
Iroquois programs. These folks simply dissolve into a furious stream of
extremely angry "
enhanced vocabulary" language at the mere mention of PM John G. Diefenbaker (the politician who was responsible for the program cancellation). I suspect there are many similar folks in the UK who had been on the TSR2 and other programs.
Other
Arrow and
Iroquois program engineers went to the UK. In fact, a very close friend of mine who is still alive (
Herb Saravanamuttoo is now 88 years old) left Canada and went to work for RR and then Bristol in the UK where he did a computer simulation of the Olympus 593 afterburning turbojet engine concentrating on the intakes and exhaust nozzle geometry and scheduling (i.e. programming). This large and very advanced afterburning turbojet was used to power the TSR2 strike-reconnaissance aircraft and more prominently, the Concorde SST.
BTW - the Concorde in regular airline service logged more supersonic time than any other aircraft type in history - despite the fact that
only 14 airplanes were put into service by BA and AF (a total of 20 airframes were built). The reason is that every Concorde flight was many hours in duration and nearly all of those flight hours were supersonic, whereas most military aircraft only do supersonic dashes for a few minutes at a time (
the SR71 is a key exception to that).
The
real magic of the Concorde's sustained supersonic range and performance came from the intakes and exhaust nozzles on those Olympus engines and most specifically, the programming of the intakes and exhaust nozzles as speed, altitude and other flight conditions change. Without that unique intake and exhaust geometry and scheduling, the Concorde's
supersonic duration would be measured in
minutes and not
hours.
With respect to 1950-60's UK policies on manned aircraft - just look-up the
Sandys Report - the articles on-which will make your eyes water with their sweeping statements of utterly un-informed BS and faulty predictions of the future - that went-on to cripple the British aircraft industry. Coupled with the conduct of the Diefenbaker government in Canada on the Arrow program, the
Sandys Report in the UK is a text book example of why non-technical people should never be given control of highly technical issues.
Politicians - what a curse.
), but it didn't suffer from the asymmetric thrust issues of most other twin engine aircraft.
