CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: The Avro Arrow: Canada’s Lost Jet

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In the early 1950s, as tensions between the West and the Soviet Union grew, the Royal Canadian Air Force began looking for a new kind of fighter. Military planners feared that Soviet long-range bombers could one day fly over the North Pole and across the Canadian Arctic, and they wanted an aircraft fast enough to intercept them far from Canada’s cities. The job went to Avro Canada, a company based in Malton, Ontario, near Toronto. Its engineers designed the CF-105 Arrow, a large two-seat jet with a triangular delta wing. The design was extremely ambitious for its time. Among other advances, the Arrow used an early electronic flight control system, in which the pilot’s movements reached the controls as electrical signals rather than purely through mechanical links.

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The first Arrow was rolled out of its hangar before a large crowd of workers, officials and reporters on October 4, 1957. Unfortunately for Avro, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, on the very same day, and the news from space quickly pushed the new jet off the front pages. The Arrow first flew on March 25, 1958, with test pilot Janusz Żurakowski at the controls. During later test flights, it reached speeds approaching twice the speed of sound. Remarkably, it did so with American-built engines that had been fitted only as a temporary measure. A more powerful Canadian engine, the Orenda Iroquois, was being developed for the production aircraft, but it was never installed in an Arrow that flew.

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The project, however, was becoming very expensive. Each aircraft was costing far more than first planned, and some defence experts argued that guided missiles, rather than fighter planes, would be the best protection against future attacks. On February 20, 1959, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker announced that the program was cancelled. Avro sent thousands of employees home that same afternoon, and roughly 14,000 people at the company lost their jobs, along with many more at its suppliers. The government then ordered that the finished aircraft, the tools used to build them and the technical drawings be destroyed. The day became known to many Canadians as “Black Friday.”

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The cancellation had lasting effects. With little work left for them in Canada, many of Avro’s best engineers moved to the United States, and a group of them joined NASA, where they worked on the American human spaceflight program, including the missions that took astronauts to the Moon. Historians still debate whether the government made the right decision. Only a few pieces of the Arrow survived, among them the nose section of one aircraft, now displayed at a museum in Ottawa. In recent years, searchers have also recovered some of the scale models that were launched over Lake Ontario during testing. For many Canadians, the Arrow remains a symbol of what the country might have achieved, and its story has been told in books, documentaries and a 1997 television miniseries.