With a wide range of interesting projects on the go, including the first civilian passenger jetliner and a strange flying-car platform for the U.S. military (that looked to all the world like a "flying saucer"), the Avro Corporation was the obvious choice to design the new plane.
Initially equipped with under-powered engines for testing purposes, Arrow prototypes were still able to set speed and altitude records. But the real test would come when the planned high-powered Iroquois engines were installed.
Many experts still believe that with the higher-thrust engines, the Arrows performance figures would have remained unrivaled until American and Russian jet fighters of the early 1970s caught up.
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It was not to be as an ill wind blew from Ottawa. Winning on a cost-cutting platform, the newly elected federal government was not inclined to think through the long-term possibilities and implications of the sweeping policy changes it supported. On February 20, 1959 ("Black Friday" as it came to be known) the decision was handed down to cancel the Arrow project.
Over the years, the governments actions in 1959 have given rise to a number of questions, and even a few conspiracy theories. Not only did the new government insist that the project be killed, it also ordered all six existing prototype aircraft, along with any and all documentation, drawings -- and even photographs and film footage -- be destroyed.
But despite its early demise, today the Arrow enjoys a kind of cult status within the aerospace community. The subject of dozens of books and magazine articles, even a TV mini-series staring Dan Aykroyd, Michael Moriarty and Christopher Plummer was recently produced by CBC about the mythical airplane.
Independent websites devoted to the memory of the Arrow dot the internet landscape and one man in the province of Alberta has even gone so far as to painstakingly hand build a full-scale replica out of plywood!
Additionally, efforts are currently underway to locate and retrieve the nine scale models of the Arrow (used in aerodynamics flight testing) from their watery home in Lake Ontario and place them in various aviation museums throughout Canada.
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