The Day the Arrow Died: The Avro Arrow Cancellation, February 20, 1959

On the morning of Friday, February 20, 1959, thousands of people went to work as usual at the Avro Canada plant in Malton, outside Toronto, and by the end of the day a great many of them no longer had jobs. In Ottawa that day, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker rose in the House of Commons and announced that the CF 105 Arrow program was cancelled, effective immediately. At Malton, work stopped on an interceptor that many of its builders believed was the finest aircraft of its kind in the world. On the production line sat nearly complete aircraft. In the flight sheds sat five Arrows that had flown. Within months, all of them would be cut apart for scrap, in front of cameras, on the government’s orders. Canadians who lived through it never forgot the date. In the plant towns around Malton, people simply called it Black Friday.

An interceptor built for a northern war

The Arrow was born of a specific and frightening problem. In the early 1950s, the expected attack on North America would come from Soviet bombers flying over the Arctic, and Canada, holding the ground they would cross, needed an interceptor that could meet them. The requirement was extreme. The aircraft had to fly at twice the speed of sound, climb to very high altitude, carry advanced radar and missiles, and operate in Canadian winter conditions from Canadian bases. When no foreign aircraft met the specification, the government of Louis St. Laurent approved a Canadian design, and the work went to Avro Canada at Malton, a company that had already built the CF 100 Canuck, the only Canadian designed fighter to enter mass production.

What Avro’s engineers produced was, by any fair accounting, remarkable. The Arrow was a large delta wing aircraft, elegant and purposeful, built around twin engines and an advanced electronic flight control system that made it a pioneer of the technology pilots now know as fly by wire. Its planned engine, the Orenda Iroquois, was designed and built in Canada as well, and was one of the most powerful jet engines of its generation. On March 25, 1958, the first Arrow, RL 201, made its first flight from Malton with test pilot Janusz Zurakowski at the controls. Four more aircraft followed it into the air. Reporters who watched them climb away over Lake Ontario understood that they were seeing something Canadian industry had never done before, and they wrote about it in those terms.

The bill, and a changing sky

The problem was never the aircraft. The problem was everything around it. The Arrow program was trying to build an airframe, an engine, a radar and fire control system, and a missile, the Sparrow II, all at once and all in Canada, and every one of those parallel efforts generated cost. Estimates for the program climbed again and again through the late 1950s, and the projected cost of each production aircraft climbed with them. Just as seriously, no other country would buy the aircraft. Britain and the United States both examined it and declined, which meant Canada alone would carry the full cost of development for a fleet the Royal Canadian Air Force wanted in numbers that kept shrinking as the estimates rose.

Meanwhile the threat the Arrow was built to meet was changing under it. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, and the future of attack suddenly looked like the ballistic missile, against which no interceptor could do anything at all. Canada had joined the United States in NORAD in 1958, integrating continental air defence, and Washington was pressing a different answer to the bomber threat: the Bomarc surface to air missile, which Canada agreed to accept for two sites. Diefenbaker’s government, elected in 1957 partly on economy, faced a program whose costs it had inherited, whose market had vanished, and whose target was fading. Cabinet wrestled with the file for months. The decision, when it came, was brutal in method as much as in substance. There was no wind down, no search for a buyer for the airframes, no gradual transition for the workforce. The program ended on a Friday, in a single announcement.

Black Friday and the cutting torches

The human arithmetic of February 20 was immediate. About 14,000 people at Avro and its engine subsidiary Orenda lost their jobs that day, and thousands more in the supplier companies across southern Ontario felt the cancellation within weeks. Engineers, machinists, technicians, and draughtsmen who had been working at the frontier of their trades were suddenly standing in employment lines. Families in the new suburbs around Malton, many of whom had moved for the Arrow work, faced mortgages without pay cheques. It remains one of the largest single layoffs in Canadian history, delivered in one sentence in the House of Commons.

Then came the part that fixed the cancellation in the national memory as something closer to a wound than a policy. The government ordered the completed aircraft destroyed. The five flying Arrows and the nearly complete sixth aircraft, RL 206, which had been fitted with the Iroquois engine but had not yet flown, were cut up. So were tooling, models, and much of the documentation, officially for security reasons connected to the program’s advanced technology. Workers who had built the aircraft watched the cutting torches go through them. Almost everything was lost. Almost. The nose and cockpit section of RL 206 survived, along with an Iroquois engine and other components, and they are held today by the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, where the Arrow’s nose remains one of the most quietly affecting objects in any Canadian museum. It is the front of an aircraft that no longer exists, preserved like the prow of a ship.

The legend vs. the record

No Canadian machine carries a heavier cargo of legend than the Arrow, and the record supports some of it. The engineering legend is largely true. The Arrow was a genuinely advanced design for its moment, its flight control technology was pioneering, and the Iroquois was a superb engine by the standards of the day. The prototypes flew well and met much of what was asked of them in testing. Where the legend overshoots is in treating promise as proof. The Arrow never flew with the Iroquois installed. Its radar, fire control system, and Sparrow II missile were unfinished. Whether the complete aircraft would have performed as the drawings promised, at a price any air force could pay, is a question the program was cancelled before it could answer, and honest accounts should leave it a question.

The brain drain legend is real, and routinely oversized. A group of Avro engineers, often counted at about 31, did go south and join the young NASA space program, where Canadians including Jim Chamberlin and Owen Maynard made genuine and senior contributions to the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo efforts. That is a remarkable story and it is true. But it was dozens of people, not the whole workforce. Most of the 14,000 found other work, much of it in Canada, and Canadian aviation did not die in 1959. Companies such as de Havilland Canada and Canadair went on building aircraft for decades. The conspiracy legend, that Washington ordered the Arrow killed to protect American industry, flatters everyone involved. American pressure and American alternatives were part of the context, and American officials were hardly neutral. But the cabinet records point to the drivers Ottawa itself kept citing: a cost curve no minister could defend, no export customer, and a missile age arriving ahead of schedule. The final legend, that one Arrow secretly survives intact somewhere, has no evidence behind it at all. The aircraft were cut up in public. What survives is a nose, an engine, drawings, film, and an argument Canada has never quite finished.

Why it still matters

The Arrow endures because it poses a question Canada keeps meeting in new forms: what is a country of this size willing to pay to build the hardest things itself? The cancellation was defensible on the numbers and devastating in its manner, and both halves of that sentence are true at once, which is why the argument has lasted more than sixty years. The program’s economics were grim. A small country was funding an entire advanced weapons system alone, for a shrinking order, against a fading threat. Any honest telling has to grant the government its arithmetic. But arithmetic is not the whole of a decision. A government that ends a program of this scale in a single day, destroys the aircraft, and scatters the workforce has chosen a kind of finality that no spreadsheet required, and Canadians have been arguing with that choice ever since. The nose of RL 206 in Ottawa is not really a relic of an airplane. It is a relic of the argument, and the argument is still current every time Canada weighs buying foreign against building at home.

Common questions

Why was the Avro Arrow cancelled?

The program's costs kept climbing because Avro was building an airframe, an engine, a radar system, and a missile all at once in Canada, with no export buyer to share the expense. At the same time, Sputnik and the coming missile age made a manned interceptor look less necessary, and cabinet chose the cheaper Bomarc missile path.

How many people lost their jobs when the Arrow was cancelled?

About 14,000 people at Avro Canada and its engine subsidiary Orenda lost their jobs on February 20, 1959 alone, and thousands more in supplier companies across southern Ontario felt the cancellation within weeks. It remains one of the largest single layoffs in Canadian history, delivered in one announcement in the House of Commons.

What happened to the Avro Arrow aircraft after the cancellation?

The government ordered the completed aircraft destroyed, officially for security reasons. The five Arrows that had flown and the nearly complete sixth, RL 206, were cut up, along with tooling, models, and much of the documentation. The nose and cockpit of RL 206 and an Iroquois engine survived, and are held by the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa.

Did the United States order the Arrow cancelled?

No evidence supports that legend. American pressure and American alternatives were part of the context, and Washington favoured its Bomarc missile, but the cabinet records point to the drivers Ottawa itself cited: a cost curve no minister could defend, no export customer, and a missile age arriving ahead of schedule.

Sources

Every story on this site ends with the sources it was built from. Check us.

• Avro Arrow — The Canadian Encyclopedia
• John Diefenbaker — The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Avro Arrow — Library and Archives Canada
• The Cold War in Canada — Canadian War Museum
• Canada and NATO — Veterans Affairs Canada