In Reply To:
In Reply To:
It sucks being from a smaller country sometimes. The Canadian built Avro Arrow of the 1950's was
considered the best international fighter of it's time but in all their wisdom, the Conservative Party government of prime minister John Deifenbaker opted to kill the project.
Even today this political action is regarded as a prime candidate for the Canadian Hall of Shame.
I don't know were you got that idea. The Arrow was never fully flight tested, never flew with its intended engine, electronics or weapons system. Also at the time it was behind schedule, way over budget and most importantly no other countries had shown interest in purchasing it.
Also you can blame the Conservative Party all you want but the Liberals under St. Laurant had planned to cancel the project themselves but were waiting to after an election they had expected to win.
No just Liberal CBC revisionist history. :)
Please don't interrupt Cerveloguy's weeping for the Arrow with annoying facts. ;-)
Being an aircraft enthusiast who spent a year in Canada recently, I studied the Arrow a bit, and came to the conclusion that it had little chance of meeting its goals on anything near budget or schedule. It was rare at the time for any one aircraft project to introduce a new airframe, engine, and weapons system at one shot, and that was exactly what the Arrow attempted to do, and funded by a tax base that couldn't have supported its development. Canada had (and to some degree, still has) a vibrant aerospace engineering industry, but the Arrow would have strangled companies twice the size of Avro at the time.
Of course, the US was painted as the bad guy, especially when the CBC "dramatized" it, with US armtwisting to buy the Bomarc.
Here's an interesting, very detailed history on the Arrow, on a Canadian site, which reaches a similar conclusion.
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/...her_other/arrow.html