Avro Arrow technical info

[pelmet]

http://aviationweek.com/blog/1957-broke ... 386283a1db

The cancellation of the Avro Canada CF-105 interceptor in February 1959 was a traumatic event for Canada's emerging aerospace industry. When Aviation Week reported on the fighter's rollout, in October 1957, the magazine called it "a serious contender for the top military aircraft of the next several years". High praise indeed, for a non-U.S. aircraft, given that the XB-58 supersonic bomber was in flight test and that new aircraft in the works included the A-5 Vigilante and the F-4 Phantom.

But the Arrow was extraordinary, and more so, given that the industry that produced it was less than a decade old when the prototype contract was issued in March 1955. Avro Canada had been formed by Britain's Hawker Siddeley Group after World War 2 and had quickly produced the CF-100 interceptor, the C-102 jet airliner (the world's second to fly), and the CF-100's Orenda engine, which was also fitted to Canadian-built Sabre fighters.

The CF-105 was a different kettle of fish entirely, designed to shoot down Soviet jet bombers over the Arctic, long before shorter-legged U.S. interceptors could touch them. Key requirements were a big radar, large missile load, long range and high speed, and agility at high speed and altitude. Translated: get out a long way quickly and accomplish multiple engagements before returning to refuel.

Chief designer Jim Floyd and his team produced a unique configuration, detailed in a 1958 lecture to the Royal Aeronautical Society. The delta wing was chosen for supersonic efficiency, and had a cambered and notched leading edge for better maneuverability. It was mounted on top of the fuselage (at the price of a complex landing gear) to gain the benefits of a continuous tip-to-tip structure and a simple fuselage design, with straight inlet ducts, easy engine access, and a large weapon bay. The missile bay was a drop-down pallet, offering the potential of interchangeable units for other missions.

The performance requirements meant that almost everything on the airplane had to be invented. No existing engine would do the job, so Avro spun off a new Orenda Engines subsidiary to produce the Iroquois, the most powerful supersonic engine of the 1950s. The airframe took Canada into the world of integrally machined skins, and both airframe and engine used titanium. The CF-105 was the first aircraft to use 4,000 psi hydraulics. Canada enlisted Hughes for help with the radar and missiles, but the radar was new and the missile was the active-homing Sparrow II. Management was a huge challenge, both because the aircraft was complex (the second-biggest Mach 2 airplane anywhere) and because of the program's sheer size: at its peak, Avro Canada was the nation's third-largest company and in the world Top 100.

Technically, it went quite well. The first four Arrows proved fast, even with interim J75 engines that delivered only three-quarters of the Iroquois' thrust: on the seventh test flight, the first CF-105 accelerated through 1,000 mph in a climb at 50,000 feet. By early 1959, the first Iroquois-powered Mk2 was in taxi tests.

Politically, the story was different. A new Progressive Conservative government had been elected in March 1957, sworn to rein in government spending. In June, Canada agreed to buy an extension of the U.S. Semi-Automatic Ground Environment air defense system and Boeing Bomarc missiles, further stressing the budget. Britain's infamous Defence White Paper of April 1957 declared that the Lightning would be the RAF's last manned fighter: the CF-105 had been seriously considered as its replacement. And despite the progress, there was a good deal of time and money left in the development program.

On February 20, 1959, prime minister John Diefenbaker announced the cancellation of the CF-105, and within two months almost all the hardware in the program had been destroyed and nearly 30,000 jobs eliminated.

The Arrow lived on in legends: Diefenbaker had scrapped the project under direct orders from Washington, which saw it as a threat to the U.S. industry; one of the prototypes had been spirited away before the wrecking crews arrived, and was hidden in Canada or in secret tests in the United States. Myths and reality have been the subject of more books and movies than many successful projects. As recently as 2012, the Canadian government -- bumbling its way through another fighter procurement -- was forced to deny that a neo-Arrow was a candidate to replace the F/A-18.

Would it have worked? The late Bill Gunston, technical editor of Flight in the 1950s and a shrewd reader of programs, believed that it would have done, particularly with British support (and the existence of Typhoon today shows how wrong the British government was in 1957). Even with the Soviet Union's backing away from strategic bombers in favor of missiles, the Arrow would have been very useful in Western Europe for defense against Tu-22M regional bombers. But none of that, unfortunately, was foreseen in 1959.

Below is the Aviation Week story from back then.

http://aviationweek.com/site-files/avia ... Arrow1.pdf

http://aviationweek.com/site-files/avia ... Arrow2.pdf

[Canoehead]

Pretty amazing events transpired over there at the corner of Derry and Airport Roads over the years. Also, next time you are driving up the 400 North past Perry Sound, you will notice the road names- named after parts of that Arrow history (see if you can figure out why;).

Great book to read is Shutting Down the National Dream by Greig Stewart.

[iflyforpie]

I like the Arrow, and what it represented for the Canadian aerospace industry and Canada in general... but there are so many myths and 'what ifs' surrounding it that it gets blown out of proportion to what it really was or would have been... ... and its actual impact on the Canadian aerospace industry.

The Arrow was still very embryonic in its development when it was cancelled, which fuels the debates even more. Not only had it not passed combat qualifications, but reliability, and even basic flight test programs had not been completed in the couple hundred hours of flying split between five airframes.

The lack of range would have most likely been solved by putting a fuel tank where the weapons pack was and mounting weapons externally.. robbing it of high speed performance and climb rate. The Arrow would have to have been extensively and expensively modified to accept NORAD's SAGE ground control computer system.. or do without and reduce its effectiveness. In the end, we would have wound up with an aircraft with roughly the same performance as the F-4--with none of the multi-role capabilities. A Mach 3 Arrow was never in the cards... even the US cancelled their two serialized Mach 3 aircraft.. one before production (the XB-70) and one at the mockup stage (the XF-108).

Personally, I like the aviation industry in Canada that flourished after the Arrow. Those Orenda engineers who were building what was arguably the most advanced turbine engine in the world were taken aback when working on P&WC's embryonic PT6.. a tiny little engine that required much more demanding tolerances because it was so small. Of course, the PT6 went on to be the best selling turbine engine in history. Then DHC moving from small bush planes into commuter airliners, Canadair moving from mod and licensed manufacture of aircraft to indigenous designs, and both of them coming together to form at one time what was the third largest airframer in the world. Sure, they required a ton of loans and grants... but nowhere near the cost-plus-fee wastage of defense contracts. And the Avro Factory in Malton made wingsets for (McDonnell) Douglas for decades after the Arrow was cancelled.

Now here in 2015... with the latest member of the C Series taking to the sky, Canada's Golden Age of Aviation is here and now. The C Series stands to possibly make money rather than costing it.. and will be plying the skies in one form or another 30-40 years from now instead of being ignominiously perched in a public space with a pole up its ass, bird shit on its tail, and fading paint from it's former glory days.

I'd rather have that than some Canadian version of the US F-35 of which it or certainly its successor may well wind up being America's Arrow.

[Taiser]

It was a fine machine, I'm sure. Something to be proud of. The myths have no doubt grown over the years but that's understandable. I got no issue with the cancellation, if it was related to insane costs rising... you have to draw a line somewhere IF that was the case, and not the fact that we were bamboozled into a missile plan!

What pisses me off is when they turned around and DESTROYED everything from plans, to prototypes to parts!!! That is pretty much sacrilege and the bastards should hang for destroying part of our heritage!

[BGH]

Whether true or just another rumour will never be known but the reason for destroying everything was because both the British & the Americans wanted to buy the whole works so in order to not have to explain what could have been a very capable airframe someday that was cancelled by the conservatives,they had the whole works destroyed.

Daryl

[Driving Rain]

Pretty amazing events transpired over there at the corner of Derry and Airport Roads over the years. Also, next time you are driving up the 400 North past Perry Sound, you will notice the road names- named after parts of that Arrow history (see if you can figure out why;).

Great book to read is Shutting Down the National Dream by Greig Stewart.

Your talking about the town of Nobel Ontario. It was home to the Orenda engines test facility.

[photofly]

The Aviation Week article mentions something that in hindsight forms an interesting irony: that the public unveiling of the Arrow took place on the same day as the Soviet Sputnik launch.

Just as the first artificial satellite pushed the Arrow off the front page of the news, so the ICBM technology that put Sputnik in orbit made the Arrow obsolete.

[Canoehead]

Pretty amazing events transpired over there at the corner of Derry and Airport Roads over the years. Also, next time you are driving up the 400 North past Perry Sound, you will notice the road names- named after parts of that Arrow history (see if you can figure out why;).

Great book to read is Shutting Down the National Dream by Greig Stewart.

Your talking about the town of Nobel Ontario. It was home to the Orenda engines test facility.

Yep that's it.
http://angelsoftheunderground.ca/buildi ... index.html

[Shiny Side Up]

In the end, we would have wound up with an aircraft with roughly the same performance as the F-4--with none of the multi-role capabilities.

So in other words,exactly what we did end up with?

[Old Dog Flying]

Daryl: The British wanted to lease two aircraft for their Blue Streak missile program and the USA was not interested in buying the aircraft but was willing to provide 100 ship-sets of the Falcon missiles and fire control units. And there were plenty of stories going around about why the project was chopped up for pots and pan.

I interviewed dozens of old Avro engineers and others in 1974 while at Staff School and to a man they all agreed that the axe fell on everything as a result of enormous cost over-runs and the pissing contest between Diefenbaker and Crawford Gordon. Plus the fact that the Minister of Defence was a retired Army Grunt, who, on the day of the roll-out said to Dief, "Well we won't be needing this thing now that Russia has those missiles".

Barney

[BGH]

I was fortunate to meet a fellow who said he was to be one of the test pilots for the arrow but lost the coin flip for the first flight.After the cancellation he became a science teacher,had nice things to say about the aircraft.

Daryl

[Thunderbyrd]

Was there anything an Arrow could do that the F-106 or Mirage III couldn't?