Avro Arrow Engineer Remembers the Cancelled Fighter

By Lawrence Gleason
The Canadian-built Avro Arrow was the world’s most advanced fighter interceptor of its time when the Canadian government ordered work on the project stopped on February 20, 1959.
All six Arrows built were scrapped. Ever since the Avro Arrow has symbolized Canada’s lost potential.
One young man working on the Arrow project was Graeme MacKay, known today as as an outspoken Sturgeon County councillor.
The Arrow project was his first job after graduating in aeronautical engineering.
The RCAF had high specifications for the aircraft design team that built the Arrow.
The plane they wanted had to be an all weather, twin engined, supersonic interceptor with a two person crew and a combat ceiling of not less than 60,000 feet (about 18.2 kilometres). It had to have a maximum speed at altitude of Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound, or about 2,300 kilometres per hour) and it had to climb to 50,000 feet in less than 6 minutes. At that altitude it had to manoeuvre at 2g at Mach 1.5 without loss of speed or altitude. It also had to have a supersonic combat radius of 200 miles (320 kilometres).
Fourty years later those specifications are difficult to attain. In the 1950s, no foreign aircraft was capable of any of that, but the Arrow was meeting those specifications when Canada’s recently elected Diefenbaker government shut the Arrow project down.
MacKay remembers the day.
“On the plant loudspeaker management announced the Prime Minister stated in the House of Commons that the Avro Arrow and Iroquois engine projects were terminated. Until official details were available we were to continue working.”
But shortly after lunch MacKay’s boss told him to write an essay detailing what he had been working on and to tape it to his desk.
He was told he could pick up his personal belongings on an assigned day the following week. Then he and 12,000 other Avro employees were ordered to leave the plant immediately.
It was the end of the Arrow.
While the 18 preceeding months were among the most exciting of MacKay’s career, he hasn’t talked much about those days.
“It’s a personal thing. I talk about it if people ask.”
MacKay was hired by Avro straight out of post-secondary school, one of four Southern Alberta Institute of Technology graduates chosen. He believes having his pilot’s license helped him get hired.
MacKay was first assigned to the engineering department’s technical design team and eventually chose the flight test department.
“Working in the classroom with physics is one thing but working in the profession with physics and seeing the application was rather different. We calculated mainly with slide rules. Electronic computers were really new at that time.”
MacKay remembers how security surrounding the aircraft at first prevented him from an assignment.
“I was given the job of sketching then drawing blueprints of the cockpit instrument panel configuration for each of the Arrows. Each cockpit had a different configuration. There were six Arrows built, each one was to perform a different flight test mission.
“I remember the first airplane I was assigned to sketch. I had to sit in the cockpit and sketch the configuration of the instruments, switches, panels and so on. I located the airplane in the flight test hangar. When aircraft are finished being prepared for a test flight they are quarantined. There is a fence around them and no one can go beyond the fence. I spoke to the guard at the hangar door. I said that I have to get up in that cockpit to sketch the cockpit. You can imagine what his response was.”
MacKay went back to his boss and told him what happened. He received security clearance about half an hour later. A security guard and crew chief escorted him to the Arrow where a ladder was set up for him.
“The ejection seat was loaded and ready to fire. I got a quick briefing on what not to touch.”
Test pilots often wanted an instrument or panel moved elsewhere. Changes were made quickly. When the pilot was satisfied with the instrument layout, a drawing was made of the configuration.
“It was thrilling to climb into the cockpit of a big world-class, state of the art airplane. The safety director for the United States Air Force said that cockpit layout was the best he had ever seen. Sitting there and looking out at the big, long, sleek needle-nose and beautiful delta wings was really quite impressive. It was hard to imagine that four years before I was a kid struggling to get through grade twelve in a little village of 70 population in northern Saskatchewan. That crossed my mind many times.”
MacKay added, “Believe me, I stretched my sessions in that cockpit to the point where I thought someone would go to my boss and say what the heck is that guy doing up there, he’s taking a long time, you know. But I had a good boss and he knew, because he’d be doing the same thing. I’d spend a whole afternoon with the paperwork and I was good at that, I was good at drawing.”
MacKay was also an eyewitness to the speed the Arrow was flying at.
“One day my boss invited me to the telemetry room to witness a high speed test flight north from Malton Airport. The telemetry equipment recorded 200 things the Arrow was doing as it flew, for example, altitude and Mach number. The test pilot was also in communication with the telemetry centre. Mach 1.96 was achieved using the less powerful American engines. The Iroquois engine was being fitted into the sixth Arrow.”
The Canadian-made Iroquois engines were highly anticipated and completed the Arrow. The Iroquois engines were one-third more powerful than the American engines and were also lighter, made mostly of titanium.
MacKay also worked on the Iroquois engines as a member of the engine test team with the task of searching for hot spots in the engine tailpipes.
“They were a new type tailpipe just recently fitted. When two powerful engines are operating so close together one never knows if hot spots are developing.”
MacKay has seen the made for television movie about the Arrow project.
“About 80 per cent of it was pretty realistic while 20 per cent was on the dramatic side, stretching it a bit. The show showed the government had a bone to pick with Avro, when I think in essence the military also had a bone to pick with Avro and I think the Americans took advantage of the situation.”
While MacKay worked on the Arrow, already another team behind him was designing what was called Arrow 3.
“Their task was to design a 3,000 mile per hour (4,800 kilometres per hour) air intake and to fit the airplane with external fuel tanks.
Told that sounds a lot like a space shuttle, MacKay answered, “Now you’re getting there.”
He added, “Within a week they already had models of this airplane. That was right behind me, I could turn, look back and see the model they had constructed. These were aerial platforms for war on earth and eventually, because the design of it and so on, potentially adaptable for space research. Because you see, once you get up to 100,000 feet you get into space. If an Arrow can carry a space weapon up to 100,000 feet, you are relatively free of gravity and air resistance so you have a tremendous advantage.”
Jan Zurakowski had been the chief test pilot on the Arrow. When he retired MacKay’s team worked with him.
Zurakowski made the first Arrow test flight on March 25,1958, which was a remarkable day in history for another reason.
It was the day the first satellite, Sputnik, was launched by the Soviet Union.
The Western world was in shock. It meant the Soviet Union had the capability of launching intercontinental ballistic missiles into North America.
The day the Arrow first flew was a triumph, but on that same day Sputnik put into question the role of interceptor fighters that could down bombers.

After the Arrow project was cancelled abruptly by the Conservative government, it chose to go with the cheaper defense option of an interceptor missile- the Bomarc.
“A friend of mine worked on the Bomarc missile at Boeing. It was not a popular missile to say the least,” MacKay said.
Two years later, well after the Arrow was scrapped and the American Bomarc missile program abandoned- and after the Canadian government had purchased a number of the already obsolete missiles- the Canadian government spent a further $200 million purchasing 64 used American aircraft we called the Voodoos.
“The jets were barely capable of Mach 1. We could have had 130 Arrows for that price,” MacKay said. “Manned interceptors are still with us today. It was obvious the government had some bad and costly advice.”
Fourty years after it was scrapped, the mystique of the Arrow, and what would have been the continuation of a world-beating Canadian high tech industry, lives on.
“It was a thrilling time,” MacKay said.