Comment by the_af
Comment by the_af 8 months ago
Why were all prototypes and blueprints destroyed so thoroughly? Why not keep one for a museum? And why the blueprints?
I'm sure there are security reasons, but it still seems so wasteful.
Comment by the_af 8 months ago
Why were all prototypes and blueprints destroyed so thoroughly? Why not keep one for a museum? And why the blueprints?
I'm sure there are security reasons, but it still seems so wasteful.
Killing it was the right call for the wrong reasons. But because it was the wrong reasons, it meant that no attention was paid on investing the tech into a new plane or resources.
Diefenbaker being "suckered" by the Americans is not what really happened (the CBC mini-series on the Arrow has some really cringey scenes about that angle, as well as portraying conservative party ineptitude and American arrogance). The more you read into Diefenbaker, the more he comes across as vain and susceptible to overreacting to slights (perceived or real), in over his head on the international stage, and ignorant of cold war realities (despite it being his government that had Canada form NORAD with the US).
It did set the stage for Canada's mercurial relationship with the United States, as Canada tended to over-react and over-compensate our opinions in both directions since then. This still continues to this day.
The article doesn't get into how Soviet spies were uncovered in Canada in the 1950s and 60s. Governments were not being paranoid in the face of those revelations.
Right, the spy threat would be the "security reasons" I guessed at.
But still, wouldn't successful projects which were later decommissioned be more at risk of spies than an unsuccessful project? Yet successful projects do not have their blueprints and airframes routinely destroyed without a trace.
The engineers that worked on it thought so, too. So they saved them: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/saved-avro-arrow-bl...
After this news broke there was, briefly, a campaign to convince the government to consider revisiting the Arrow, but it was rebuffed on the grounds that it was rather unstealthy: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/one-decade-ago-canada-alm...
The most likely reason for scrapping the program so thoroughly was to benefit the US aerospace industry; they wanted to ensure there was no chance of competition, and encouraged the notion that ICBMs had made interceptors obsolete, as an excuse: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadas-avro-arrow-jet-...
I would guess it was due to behind the scenes meddling from an 'ally', that was itself probably encouraged by its war industry.
My dad was an avionics and air-to-air weaponry guy in the RCAF in the 1950s-60s (you might understand my HN nick) and was training up on the Arrow's suite, which was being designed from scratch by RCA Canada in Montreal as Project ASTRA. It was a direct competitor to U.S. systems made primarily by Hughes, and the missiles were a direct competitor to those from what is now Raytheon. One of Avro's desperate options prior to cancellation was the idea of scrapping ASTRA for a 100% U.S. avionics and missile suite.
Yes. It's a "scorched earth" approach to prevent the project being revived.
Something similar happened to the RAF Nimrod: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12294766 , although I think the safety case was much stronger there after one caught fire in the air.
It's very Trumpian. Perhaps the steelman argument might be "if we leave this thing in limbo, people will continue to advocate spending more money on it". Sometimes institutions or individuals in them will have a pet project that they keep pushing beyond economic sense, and the only way to get them to stop is to shoot their pet.
There was no need to run a scorched-earth policy to prevent the Nimrod project from being revived. The plane that caught fire, killing 14 people, in mid air was a flying deathtrap. It had leaky internal fuel pipes that ran past a different (extremely hot) pipe that allowed exhausts from one engine to be used in restarting the other engine after an intentional in-flight shutdown (they used to shut down one engine to loiter more fuel efficiently when they reached their mission's surveillance area). The leaky fuel pipes were the aftermath IIRC of an air-to-air refuelling system that was retrofitted to allow long range flights down to the Falklands islands. The devastating official post-crash report (the Haddon-Cave review) is at [0]. It was one of the classic 'normal accidents' situations - they got away with multiple routine internal fuel leaks up until the day when they didn't.
Separately, the planes were all very old, and had been constructed over several years so were all slightly different. Projects that tried to do fleet upgrades usually went massively over-budget because each airframe had to be treated as a special case, even for things that you would expect to be standardised like the basic fuselage and wing dimensions.
[Edit] The Haddon-Cave review was exceptional in that it actually named and shamed those in the MOD and industry who helped develop the bodged safety case. People in the MOD and industry lost their jobs after the crash.
[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
I'm sure the answer is probably fairly mundane, but it's birthed a whole lineage of nationalist semi-conspirational explanations (US colonial masters chewed Diefenbaker out, demanded the total cessation and destruction of the project, etc.)
I suspect it makes absolutely zero sense for Canada of the 50s to be designing and building its own fighter-bomber jets, but the mythos is strong.
And the vibe of the whole thing is very topical, of course, with the US basically demanding we spend more money subsidizing their defense industry by buying their overpriced armaments from them while at the same time key people in the administration openly musing about the elimination of our sovereignty.
The US: having it both ways ("be our subservient raw resource provider and nothing else" and "oh, but it costs so much to defend you") since forever.
> And the vibe of the whole thing is very topical, of course, with the US basically demanding we spend more money subsidizing their defense industry by buying their overpriced armaments from them while at the same time key people in the administration openly musing about the elimination of our sovereignty.
Surprised this doesn't get mentioned more.
If Canada wanted to, we could easily scale military spending by investing it in homegrown projects instead of spending it at the altar of the mililtary industrial complex.
It's easy for America to complain about other countries not spending as much when it's the one that owns the market we all shop at.
> If Canada wanted to, we could easily scale military spending by investing it in homegrown projects instead of spending it at the altar of the mililtary industrial complex.
We're about to find out if we want to. This is a major point in Carney's defence plan.
As a Canadian, I have mixed feeling about this. You can develop and build domestic defence industries, but it only becomes economical if you can develop an export market. Even then, the inputs for parts/resources are still global.
Sweden has one heck of a domestic defence industry, but it's tailor made for its requirements and expensive. The SAAB Gripen is one of the best planes in the world for what it was designed to do: operate dispersed off of regional roads when your main infrastructure is destroyed or unavailable. But its flyway cost is the same as an F-35 because hundreds have been built instead of thousands. And the Gripen's engine is still from General Electric.
The NLAW anti-tank weapon is a good example of export success. It was developed jointly with the British and has had a lot of exports and proven success in Ukraine.
On top of that, Canada's defence civil service is terrible at procurement. Even when we buy foreign, we manage to drive up the costs to the point where its rediculously price just to shove in some domestic "advantage", rather than focusing that money on stuff we are really good at (we tend to kick ass at sonar and anti-sub tech, for example).
We shall see. Big words, but this country has a history of doubling down on mediocrity and parochial interests.
I personally would love to contribute in whatever way I could to homegrown manufacturing, tech, and maybe even defence sector, and am willing to put in the hours and even compensation cut to make things happen in this country.
I just hope there's investors out there willing to make things happen, and that the gov't doesn't just do its usual thing of protecting a few existing corporate buddies.
> If Canada wanted to, we could easily scale military spending by investing it in homegrown projects instead of spending it at the altar of the mililtary industrial complex.
That doesn't mean no longer spending money at the altar of the military-industrial complex, it just means having your own altar. Which you're free to do, by the way. You don't have to buy our stuff.
Canadians seem to consistently ignore the effects that a strong military-industrial complex has had on the US (and UK, to a lesser extent), particularly on foreign policy. When major components of the TSX Composite need sales, they're going to start lobbying MPs to get them. It's not a coincidence that a lot of the defense industry is based in Northern Virginia.
As far as the sovereignty... I don't think you have to worry about that.
"You don't have to buy our stuff."
You should see what happens when we even make motions like we're not going to.
https://skiesmag.com/news/bombardier-concerned-about-u-s-ret...
a legit concern because:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/us-government-slaps-...
and then again
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bombardier-cseries-boeing-1...
I seem to recall this being tied to our review the F-35 programme last time, but I can't find a reference to it. In any case, not buying F35s will have huge consequences with the US, if it doesn't happen.
It was a long range bomber interceptor and it made sense until ICBMs happened. Canadian territory is vast and mostly barren in a way that no other NATO country is, having specialized equipment to defend it can make a big difference.
It was an interceptor. Ideas for conversion to a bomber role were only ideas.
My bad, I meant it was an interceptor against bombers.
Re-reading, I now see that you meant interceptor of bombers.
> designing and building its own fighter-bomber jets
The Avro Arrow was only proposed as an interceptor but neither a fighter nor bomber. There were spitball ideas of future bomber adaptations but they were never part of the project.
Yes.
> Prime Minister John Diefenbaker [ordered] all the completed planes (five plus a nearly finished sixth) to be chopped up and destroyed, along with all plans and blueprints so that the plane could never fly again.
Stopping the program was understandable, but the destruction is mysterious and the article doesn't say a word about why. Strange.