A remarkable thing popped up in the national news over the weekend: there is a movement afoot to resurrect the Avro Arrow as a replacement for the CF-18 fighter-bomber, supplanting the F-35 Canada is currently planning to buy.
The idea is intriguing, nostalgic, and extremely off the wall. Quite likely, and literally, it will never get off the ground.
The Avro Arrow was Canada's big technological leap in the 1950s - a new, incredibly fast fighter designed to shoot down Russian bombers coming over the North Pole.
Since air-to-air missiles were still in their infancy, the plane was also designed to carry AIR-2 Genie rockets. These were unguided nuclear (!) rockets meant to be fired into a squadron of oncoming Russian bombers, detonating a 1.5 kiloton nuclear warhead (over Canadian territory, no less). The nuke was supposed to swat the Ruskies from the sky. Better to blow up your own, small nuke over the Canadian wilderness than let the Russians drop a five megaton hydrogen bomb over Toronto or New York, I guess.
I point this out because that is how far back we are in the development of technology and thinking when the Arrow was being developed.
The Arrow was big and fast. And while cutting edge at the time, that edge is pretty dull now.
The big thing promoters of the F-35 push is stealth - the ability to be less visible to enemy radar. Take a look at the F-35, or its stable mate, the F22 Raptor. Everything on it is angled. The sides are angled downward, as are the vertical stabilizers. The skin is radar absorbent. The Arrow, on the other hand, is a big box - all right angles and flat sides, with an aluminum skin. Perfect to pick up on radar, in other words.
This leads us to the ultimate question: what will Canada's new fighter be used for? If it is only to defend our airspace, then we don't need to be stealthy, since we're not hiding from our own ground-based radar. But since the bad guys coming our way will have radar on their inbound fighters, one would think stealth is a useful thing for air-to-air combat.
However, if we are going on foreign adventures, bombing bad guys overseas (Libya, Kosovo, Gulf War I) then having an aircraft that is hard to detect is pretty helpful.
There is something of a precedent in the idea of flying old airplane designs, however. Some of them are simply so good, a good replacement has yet to be found for them. The B-52 first flew in, get this, in 1952. It's expected to keep flying operationally for another 30 years. In 2005, it celebrated it's 50th year of operational service. The XB-70 was cancelled, and they came up with the B-1B and B-2A, but still nothing has replaced its capabilities. Actually designed before the Arrow, it's still flying, but only in situations where total air superiority has already been established.
For civilian aircraft, Viking Air of Victoria, B.C. has purchased the type certificates for de Havillland's long discontinued Beaver, Otter, Twin Otter, Chipmunk, Caribou, Buffalo, and Dash-7. It has begun building entirely new Twin Otters as of four years ago. That design first flew in 1965.
The new Twin Otters have more powerful engines, a philosophy that would be repeated with a new Arrow. New, modern engines would be tremendously more fuel efficient, giving the hulking bird that was designed for thirsty turbojets much more range and capability. The engines designed for the F-35, for instance, produce as much power without afterburner as the original Arrow'
A fighter-bomber, however, is not a Twin Otter. It needs to go up against the best the bad guys have to offer. While an Arrow airframe with modern avionics and engines might be a capable aircraft, will it be able to fight with the bad guys, or be easy pickings?
My guess is the bad guys would eat the Arrow's lunch.
- Brian Zinchuk, Saskatchewan Weekly Newspapers Association 2012 Columnist of the Year, is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
