Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow
The Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow was a two-seat, delta-wing supersonic interceptor built by A.V. Roe Canada at Malton, Ontario, to defend North America against Soviet bombers crossing the Arctic. Developed from 1953 and first flown on 25 March 1958, it used fly-by-wire controls and flew on interim engines while its Canadian Orenda Iroquois was readied. Five aircraft flew before the federal government cancelled the programme on 20 February 1959 and ordered the completed aircraft and records destroyed; no complete example survives.
Why It Mattered
Canada has designed and built only one supersonic interceptor: the CF-105 Arrow, developed by A.V. Roe Canada between 1953 and 1959. It was meant to replace the CF-100 and to stop Soviet jet bombers approaching North America over the Canadian Arctic. The Canada Aviation and Space Museum singles out its innovative technologies, among them a fly-by-wire control system and computerized controls that let the pilot fly the aircraft electronically. The programme was cancelled on 20 February 1959, a day the museum notes is known in Canada as "Black Friday", and the decision remains controversial today. The museum calls the Arrow an icon of Canadian aviation history.
Design Notes
The Arrow was a large, two-seat, all-weather interceptor built around a delta wing, a planform still new when the type was developed and built at Malton, Ontario, in the 1950s. Avro avoided the normal prototype stage and launched directly into building production-standard aircraft, so flight testing ran on machines built the production way. Its armament was to be carried inside the airframe; the RCAF lists provision for up to four Falcon or Sparrow 2 missiles. The aircraft that flew did so on Pratt & Whitney J75s, engines less powerful than the ones intended for production. Those intended engines, the Canadian Orenda Iroquois, were flight-tested attached to the rear fuselage of a Boeing B-47, but an Iroquois never powered an Arrow. The museum observes that, at 28 tons, the Arrow weighed about as much as the Lancaster, its ancient relative from the same company.
Operational History
A.V. Roe Canada developed the Arrow between 1953 and 1959, and the first aircraft was rolled out in 1957. It flew for the first time on 25 March 1958. The programme drew in expertise from abroad: its chief engineer, James C. Floyd, was born in the United Kingdom, and its test pilot Janusz Zurakowski in Poland. Five Arrows had flown by the time the programme ended. A sixth aircraft, equipped with the production Orenda Iroquois engines, never flew before the cancellation, and 31 more aircraft were in production. RCAF test pilots flew the type, but it never made it into operational use; the air force had chosen 428 Squadron to be re-equipped with it. On 20 February 1959, while test flying was still in progress, the federal government terminated the programme. Ottawa's reasoning, as the museum records it, was that the manned bomber threat was diminishing and that air defence could be better handled by unmanned BOMARC missiles.
Afterlife
The government ordered all completed Arrows destroyed, together with the related documentation and equipment, and no complete aircraft survives. The largest surviving piece is the nose section of aircraft 25206, saved when the airframes were broken up because it was wanted as a pressure chamber at the Institute of Aviation Medicine in Toronto. The Institute donated the nose section to the museum in 1965, and it is displayed in the Cold War exhibition at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum. The same museum holds other components, among them two undercarriage legs, wingtips, an Orenda Iroquois and a Pratt & Whitney J75. In 2018 the Raise the Arrow project raised a rocket-launched test model from Lake Ontario; it is believed to be a delta test vehicle, used to check the stability of the delta-wing configuration, and one of the few surviving relics of the programme. Beyond the hardware, the museum notes the Arrow is still alive in print and in memory, and is featured in books, television programs, paintings and films.