Canadian Aviation and the Avro Arrow

With its first flight in 1958, the Avro Aircraft CF-105 Arrow appeared to be Canada's greatest aeronautical achievement. As the world’s fastest and most advanced aircraft at that time, the Arrow, flying at twice the speed of sound over the Canadian north, was to attack Soviet bombers with air-to-air nuclear missiles. Also during the mid-1950’s, the Royal Canadian Air Force, with its 27 fighter jet squadrons assigned to NATO and NORAD, was respected as one of the great air forces in the western alliance. But Canada quickly tumbled from this threshold of aeronautical leadership with the sudden cancellation and destruction of the Arrow. Fred Smye was in on the genesis of Canada’s post WW II air power and describes the decade of innovation and growth in the nation’s extraordinary aviation industry that once enabled a unique and independent air defence strategy. Smye also reveals the misinformation, misjudgments, flawed economics and political machinations that forced him to give the orders to cut up the existing Arrows when the Diefenbaker government cancelled the program on February 20, 1959. That “Black Friday” devastated Canada's aviation industry, throwing tens of thousands of workers out of highly skilled jobs and forcing an exodus of scientists and engineers to the U.S. and Britain. Canada subsequently surrendered its independent air defence strategy and came to rely on the U.S. for aviation industry sub-contracts and a meager supply of obsolete military aircraft for a diminished air force.