Later on the capability was added to carry four nuclear bombs on external hardpoints .

Not correct. The hard points were never an option on the “A” model as the wings were not built for this. Yes there was a PLAN to build new wings (as well as other upgrades) for the model “B” – but this plan (and the plane) never came about because of dear old Curtis.

Weird !!!

Whats weird about this? Money talks BS walks… The planes were cheaper.

A little side note to this: AC is currently in the middle of an upswing in business due to non US passengers not wanting to make their connections to South America through stop overs in the US. Demands by Home Land Security of VISA’s, fingerprints of stopover passengers are driving business to Air Canada. As a result Air Canada has reported extra flights from the EU to South America with stop overs in Montreal, Toronto are planned.

Lately however the politics of air travel are getting ugly as HLS are demanding passenger data of all aircraft flying over the US (but not landing) which could have a great impact on both Canadian carriers as well as Mexican. In fact the release of this information to American security groups of passengers not landing in America MAY in fact be against Canadian law.

It is interesting to note that EVERY Montreal /Toronto flight (1 hour) in theroy would have to be rerouted from the current flight plan as part of the flights take place over northern New York State. In fact a lot inter-Canadian flights such as Toronto/Vancouver fly a good part of the flight plan over the US.

Perhaps Boeing may have a talk with US Government officials to relax these new security demands… One has to wonder about timing – not the AC/Boeing deal a few days before the A380 1st flight – but the new Home Land Security demands and the following week AC changing it’s fleet over to Boeing(US product)… If we see this demand quietly go away I’ll have to say politics rules again.

“certain Canadian officials are convinced the aircraft was sabotaged while in its Canadian hangars, using a remote delay device to start the massive fuel leak.”

What a bunch of bulls**t! There are NO officials convinced of crap like this! I am convinced your mental however…

I was in Venezuela in March and the local economy sucks to put it frankly. Cutting off oil to the US and incuring increased shipping costs to halfway around the world is silly.

Yes there IS an anti US feeling in the country but it is misplaced. The IMF has caused more of an issue to this economy then the US ever could.

Buildings are half built all over the country, costs are up and to keep the country in line the domestic price of gasoline is a few pennys per gallon. I figured that the price was 4.5 cents Canadian per L! This does not help as most of the people drive rust buckets that are 20 years old!

The leader of this country should be helping to restore the economic picture before going off postal on Bush. This country was F…ed economiclly long before Bush2 took over.

I did notice that they have managed to transition to non US products quite nicely – mostly from Europe. It’s a shame – the people are quite nice (the women are BEAUTIFUL!) – too bad they are being hookwinked into thinking that the US is their sole reason for the problems their country is facing.

Valuable?

VF = Valuable Fighter… Well aren’t they? 🙂

During CF-5 production, the actual need for the aircraft was slashed in half though: of the 118 CF-5s initially deemed necessary (for a total of 130 to be built), no more than 54 would ever be in operational service at any time. Initially they rotated through storage and operational service, but it seems some aircraft hardly got any flying hours at all. Some of these were then sold on to Venezuela.

By no means all CF-5s were upgraded in the late 1980s: 20-something CF-5As, and 30-something CF-5D’s got this treatment in order to make them LIFT aircraft for the CF-18.

What gets me, (talking about upgrades) is that out of the 130 CF18’s, (not counting losses) only 70 or so are being upgraded with new equipment (NAV/COM/GPS) allowing them to be flown until 2015. The rest, (45-50?) are being stored I assume. I can’t see them being sold “as is” and I can’t think of a country in the market for them… so history as usual for Canada, repeats itself. Why buy equipment that you cannot afford to update it?

You wouldn’t manage a taxi fleet this way – why an airforce??

I guess more aircraft for Mountian View I suppose.

Whatever happened to Diefenbaker after what must have been the biggest ****-** in his career? Does he spend his retiurement with the character that shelved TSR?

He’s long dead.

FYI: Lots of evidence that Dief was given bad info by Army and Navy Generals who wanted all the money for themselves instead of it going towards the Airforce and the funding for four wings of Arrows.

In fact… the UK has to take some heat for the Arrow fall. Seems that the same “white paper” that crashed programs such as the TSR 2 in favour of ground to air nuke programs was quoted in Canada as being a big reason for our Government trashing bomber intercepters.

We bought BOMARC nukes that never flew – had a PM who kicked the warheads out of Canada and then thought… Gee now what do we do now?
I know, we’ll buy these crappy well used ex USAF F 101’s that we’ll use.

Gee, are not the F 101’s that crash every other month costing us more then what it would have cost us to allow the airforce to fly the already built 10 Arrows plus the other 28 Arrows (parts to build the rest on the shop floor)? Yup.

Then when the DND find out that flying an F101 in European weather, day or night, on the deck, is creating a lot of Aluminum junk and widows isn’t a good idea… They decide to buy more useless aircraft – this time a single engine short range fighter like the F 104 to use over HUGE remote areas of Canada.

It all came home to haunt the Army and Navy guys anyway… the armed forces were merged in the early 70’s and budget wise, these two groups were the losers. The current chief of DND is an ex fighter jock who is pushing for Canada to buy the JSF (Canada is a small partner in the program) so we may be able to afford about 6 by the time we decide to raise a PO for them!

The tv report said that the Arrow is intended to be displayed in the museum, but the footage also showed all kinds of things which I don’t think they would put in the plane if they didn’t intend it to fly. So I’m not sure.

Yes, almost all the blueprints were destroyed. But apparently the engineers who worked on the project in the late 50’s have remembered enough about it to create an exact replica. Also the report mentioned that when the project was cancelled, some engineers secretly kept documents/blueprints instead of destroying them, so I guess a little bit has survived.

Some of the engineers went on to work in American companies so no doubt some American planes built during the 60’s and 70’s benefitted from technology and experience from the Arrow.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble…

This is a very nice MOCK-UP. In the old days they made them out of wood. The alum sheeting has been supplied free of charge but the supporting structure under it all is sq. tubing!!! The gear that has been supplied is about the best item on the whole structure. It was supplied from one of the few manufacturers still around. It seems that they still had a set of plans sitting around that didn’t get shredded in Feb 1958.

They have a couple of gents that worked for Avro helping out and it appears that they have been able to pull off what has to be one of the largest scratch built 1:1 models of a real aircraft ever built. It looks great as a display – but other then being towed around in an out of a hanger, that’s it. The paint is nice…

Here is their site: http://www.torontoaerospacemuseum.com/

I question the expenditure of a massive amount of time and quite a bit of money when there are so many aircraft projects around that need help, more so when this is a working museum with *real* aircraft to take care of.

Now there *WAS* a group that was attempting to build a real FLYING copy of the Arrow. They were called the Arrow-Alliance (the page is down) and was run by a guy that has put out several books on the arrow. Some sort of group was put together that was looking into the issues involved in building such a beast.

I wasn’t well liked when I posted comments/questions to this web site, such as:

1/ How do you propose changing Transport Canada’s ban on all ex-military jet aircraft (fighters) being allowed to fly? No answer.

2/ Given the issues that have come up in the UK concerning flying the Vulcan – an aircraft that was flying only 10 years past or so and one that has industry support available, spares, zero time engines in storage, plans and training manuals at hand. Given their difficulties…
How can your group possibly hope to 1/ Raise the required money ($50+million?) and 2/ Build, test and get a permit to fly an aircraft built outside of the original Avro company? No answer.

3/ Orenda is gone. There are only two, possibly three of their engines left and these can’t be re-built. What engines do you propose – Used F404’s? Got a wiring plan? (smirk) Banned from posting.

The smell test alarm goes off…

The point was that they were taking in money to fund a project that wouldn’t get past the press release stage – which it didn’t I can now say. The whole project seemed to be setup to sell his books. This Avro Arrow to the sky so to speak rip-off came to a crashing stop when the Canadian actor Dan Ackroyd bought the rights to the Avro Company logo and Arrow symbols and he put a stop to people trying to sell a *flying* dream and pocket the cash. So much for Avro logos pasted on everything…

The Toronto group building the 1:1 model: It’s nice that we have something to show the young kids – but the dream is dead. It’s time to move on and build the worlds best regional jets and Global Expresse’s