ARC-Jim Floyd Reflections of the Avro Arrow
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Jim Floyd:Looking back on the Avro Arrow
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Jim Floyd:
Reflections of The Arrow
  Few
Canadian events have generated such a flood of controversial
and conflicting statements, written and verbal, as
the saga of the Avro Arrow, or indeed of the whole
Avro Canada company activities from the formation of
the company in 1945 to its virtual demise after the
cancellation of the Arrow/ Orenda programs in 1959.
   Books
and articles on the subject have appeared almost annually
over the past few years, some good, some containing half-truths
and others lacking the research that is an essential
ingredient for any worthwhile contribution to Canadian
history.
In
the latter category we have an eminent professor of history
at one of our leading universities writing a book which
in one chapter outlines what he considered to be a technical
deficiency on the Arrow which he claims would cause it
to disintegrate in the air. When it was pointed out to
him that he had mistakenly referred to a feature on an
entirely different aircraft, a devise not used on the
Arrow, he admitted that he had assigned the research
on the subject to one of his students! While he later
had the grace to correct the story in a second edition
of the book, the original edition was not withdrawn and
is still on the shelves of our public and institutional
libraries, where our young Canadians assume that they
can find the truth about our aviation heritage.
  
Unfortunately,
the above incident is not an isolated one and other self-styled
experts on the subject continue to provide written and
on-the-media matter which, at best, can only be described
as gross misinformation on the subject of both the Arrow
and Avro Canada in general.
   At
the other end of the scale, we have the equally erroneous
assertions that everything was 'sweetness and light'
at Avro, there were no problems on the Arrow and that
the employees were always right and were some kind of
supermen.
   Those
of us that lived with the Arrow project throughout its
short life know that we had more than our share of problems,
problems of administration of the largest and most complex
total-systems-concept aviation project ever undertaken
in Canada and technical problems associated with providing
the RCAF with an aircraft which would meet their almost
impossible requirements, involving the application of
technology well beyond the state-of-the-art at that time.
   Despite
the fact that we had assembled an engineering team of
outstanding experience and capability, the like of which
we will probably never again see in this country, we
were not immune to the constant pressure of such an undertaking
or the inevitable unwarranted criticism of outsiders
who lacked the experience to understand the difficulties
inherent in a program of that magnitude and particularly
those associated with our commitment to production drawings
prior to any flight testing.
   We
certainly did have our problems, but the bottom line
on the Arrow was that we managed to solve the problems
as they arose and despite the opinion of certain 'experts'
at one of our national scientific establishments that
the Arrow would probably never fly supersonically, test
pilot Jan Zurakowski flew through the sound barrier on
the third flight of the first Arrow, powered by the lower
thrust interim engines, exceeded 1000 mph on the seventh
flight while still climbing and accelerating at 50,000
ft. Jan and test pilot Spud Potocki carried out a number
of flights approaching, twice the speed of sound, all
with the interim engines.
   The
tough and no-nonsense RCAF evaluation pilot Jack Woodman,
after his phase 1 flight program on the Arrow reported
that " the Arrow was performing as predicted and
was meeting all guarantees ".
   An
indication of the quality and expertise of the engineering
team on the Arrow can be assessed by what they went on
to do after Black Friday. Many went into frontier-of-technology
jobs in other countries and made significant contributions
to the United States space orograms, to the Concorde
project and to Canadian, US and European commercial and
military aircraft programs.
   In
a book titled -- Apollo: The Race to the Moon, published
in 1969 by Simon and Shuster of New York, authors Charles
Murray and Catherine Bly-Cox had this to sav about the
Contribution to the American space programs made by the
ex-Avro team of Canadians that went down to NASA after
the cancellation of the Arrow program:
  " As
the Space Task Group's burden was threatening to overwhelm
it, the Canadian government unintentionally gave the
American space program its luckiest break since Wernher
von Braun had surrendered to the Americans ------ The
Canadians never gained much public recognition for their
contribution to the manned space program, but to the
people within the program their contribution was incalculable"
The book also quotes one of the original American Space Task Group engineers
as saying, about the Canadians ;
  " They
had it all over us, in many areas------ just brilliant
guys ---- They were more mature and they were bright
as hell and talented and professional, to a man."
   It
might even be said that the Arrow tragedy was not an
unmitigated disaster for many of us, since we were still
young and it allowed us to go on to bigger and newer
challenges, using the knowledge, disciplines and spirit
nurtured in the Avro programs, but the collective and
closely integrated team that had brought the 'golden
age' of Canadian aviation to life, was lost to Canada
for ever.
>>Forward
To JIM FLOYDS ROYAL AERONAUTICAL SOCIETY LECTURE>>
CONVERTED TO HTML,
AND HYPERLINKS ADDED, MARCH 28, 2001.
Scott McArthur.
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