Warbird Information Exchange

Relics of Canada's fleeting aeronautic might

A collection of documents up for auction detail the death of what was called the world's most sophisticated aircraft

MICHAEL VALPY
From Monday's Globe and Mail
December 3, 2007 at 4:56 AM EST

It has been called the theft of our national soul, the death sentence handed out nearly 49 years ago to the gloriously beautiful Avro Arrow supersonic military aircraft. No event in Canada's history has been more mythologized.

It has been our pride on the wing, our dream of perfection, our Boys' Own Annual tale of world-beating engineering, derring-do and brilliance - and the government's decision to cancel its production has been labelled an act of unparalleled spiritual vandalism that doomed us to be insignificant players in the world of high tech.

Next Sunday, almost certainly the largest collection of Arrow memorabilia, photographs, onetime secret government and production company documents, and meticulous, handwritten engineering notebooks relating to every aspect of the aircraft will go up for sale in a Toronto auction house.

The 85-year-old owner, who lives in Kingston, has instructed his name not be publicized. He is identified only as an aeronautics engineer who began his career in Britain's Royal Air Force, transferred to the Royal Canadian Air Force, went to work on the Arrow project at aircraft manufacturer A.V. Roe's plant in Malton, Ont., in 1953 and was there on Feb. 20, 1959, when a telegram arrived from Ottawa saying the Arrow was dead.

But there are clues to who he is: obviously a very high-ranking employee given the colour of his security pass (orange) and the documents he put into his briefcase after the close-down order was given and 14,528 workers lost their jobs, many of them skilled engineers who crossed the border and became part of the U.S. aeronautics and space team that sent a man to the moon.

"This stuff is so cool, a word that's probably not professional," says Michael Rogozinsky, president of Empire Auctions, which is conducting the auction. "I like airplanes. I run a model airplane club."
Mr. Rogozinsky, a certified appraiser, values the collection at between $40,000 and $50,000. He says that he will sell it only as one lot and that he has had expressions of interest from one museum and one private collector.

"If a private collector buys it, I would hope it would be donated to a museum," he says.

In the collection are many photographs of the Arrow in development, including one signed by one of the Arrow's most celebrated test pilots, W.O. (Spud) Potocki. There's a brass model of the Arrow that was handed out to visiting dignitaries and a cigarette box with an Arrow design on the lid that A.V. Roe president Crawford Gordon Jr. would give to acquaintances and politicians at Christmas.

There are handwritten statements from Mr. Gordon and other A.V. Roe executives. There's a Telex transcript of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's statement in the House of Commons announcing the cancellation of the Arrow and the termination telegram sent by an official of the Department of Defence Production.

There's a notice to all employees that they won't get their final pay until they return their tools, and about a dozen handwritten technical notebooks that Greig Stewart, author of an award-winning 1988 book about the Arrow, Shutting Down the National Dream, calls invaluable.
"To think - after all these years," he marvels.

In fact, after all these years, the story of what really happened to the Arrow, and why, remains in dispute.

The popular version - celebrated in several books, a play and a CBC-TV miniseries starring Dan Aykroyd as Crawford Gordon - is that the Arrow, able to fly twice the speed of sound, was the world's most sophisticated aircraft at the time, designed for the RCAF to shoot down Soviet bombers flying over the Arctic. The Diefenbaker government killed it either out of ignorance or because of pressure from the Americans who were jealous of Canadian engineering success, and Canada lost all its brilliant aeronautics experts and shot its aviation industry in the foot.

However, the version embraced by most, if not all, of Canada's leading historians is that A.V. Roe was a chaotically run company, development of the Arrow was way over cost and behind schedule, and the Liberal government that preceded the Diefenbaker administration had long-standing plans to pull the plug on it.

The aircraft was too expensive for the RCAF alone, but no other country was interested in buying it. Moreover, the threat of manned bombers was giving way to unmanned intercontinental missiles against which the Arrow would be no defence and, beautiful as it was, there were some flaws in its design.

Moreover, the Canadian aeronautics industry didn't die when the Arrow died.

But the order to destroy every existing Arrow, six completed aircraft and about a dozen in various stages of completion - an order that appears to have been given by the defence minister at the time, George Pearkes - inexplicably robbed the country of a piece of its history. The nose of one Arrow is in the Canada Aviation Museum in Ottawa and a full-scale replica is in the Toronto Aerospace Museum.