If you wanna break a Canadian’s heart, all ya gotta do is bring up a discussion about the Avro Arrow. The average Canadian aviation fanboy will tell you that this bird was the best of the breed, that it flew faster and higher than all its contemporaries, and that the project was cancelled by military/industrial fuckery and back room politics.
But… was it? It only ever flew once. No serious flight testing was ever done. And even if it was better…putting a new bird on the front lines always involves teething pains. The new F35s were supposed to be the pinnacle of 6th gen fighter planes… and they fall out of the sky on a regular basis. The V22 Osprey is still killing more Marines than the entire 3rd world and making widows. Putting a new bird on the line requires absolutely horrendous sacrifices of money, time and literally… blood. Pilots and crews get tested beyond their limits. New supply chains and inventories…all these realities worked against the Avro Arrow. The military already had tried, true and established interceptors.
But when airplanes soar - so do hearts. And egos. And they are crushed when they die.
Canadians are not the only ones dealing with broken hearts and dreams of what might have been. The Japanese had their hearts broken by the Kyushu Shinden - a WW2 prototype interceptor that really saw no action during the war and only a few inconclusive flight tests to make a critical judgement with. But its shape and lines were so beautiful that they stopped the heart.
In point of fact, the American P-51s, P-47s and Hellcats would have eaten them alive. The new breed F9F Bear Cats and Hawker Sea Furies at the end of the war would have been overkill. But the human heart wants what it wants, and all you can do is let it weep and heal itself.
Pusher planes are basically a ludicrous effort at flying proper airplanes backwards, HAR HAR HAR! The aerodynamics of our world have no room for aesthetics… and after the war even the Americans dismissed them from consideration for front line combat duty.
My inner diesel punk adores them anyway, and it’s too bad that they are too beautiful for this world.
This was the plane that the protagonist flew in the final attack in "Godzilla, Minus One." Good movie, if you ever get to see it. Would have been good even without Godzilla.
ReplyDeleteYeah. I saw that. It was a cool plane to fly at the big Lizard.
DeleteI think they were an option to fly in Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator Pacific back in the Day. I can't remember if it was better than a Tony or a Zero.
Never wrenched on a Canadian plane but did on a lot of British stuff. A royal pain in the ass. Stupid fuckers. I'm surprised they didn't safety wire the logbooks closed.
ReplyDeleteThe arrow was over budget and the engine it flew with was under powered. The engine it was supposed to be outfited with was cancelled and the Avro corp decided to build their own engine.
ReplyDeleteExile1981
My dad built F-102s and F-106s during the 50's and 60's in San Diego. I had the most awesome posters of them. From May, '72 till May '73, I worked on Delta Daggers, F-102s at Keflavik, Naval Air Station, Iceland. It was their last active duty deployment, all the rest were either retired or Air Nat'l Guard.
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