Brain drain

Avro Arrow failed to fly, but the minds behind it went on to bigger, faraway things

It was faster than any jet in its class. It was armed with nuclear missiles. It was intended to defend us from Soviet attacks. It was going to make Canada great.

But on Feb. 20, 1959, John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservative Party government dashed the hopes and hype and cancelled the Avro Arrow Mk. 1 supersonic jet interceptor project. The decision put nearly 15,000 people out of work, according to Bill Zuk, author of several books on the subject, including The Avro Arrow Story: The Revolutionary Airplane and its Courageous Pilots. In fact, including related supply chains, he said as many as 60,000 people may have lost their jobs.

While the story of the Avro Arrow is one the greatest couldhave-been’s in modern Canadian history, there is one part of the story that is less well-known but just as significant. The world didn’t get to see Canada make aviation history, but the world did wake up to the fact we had the brain power to produce such an advanced feat of science and technology.

The day the Arrow project was cancelled became known as Black Friday in the Canadian aviation industry. So great was the impact that members of the industry were still mourning its loss more than five years later, said Malcolm Hines, former director of marketing for Orenda Engines. Orenda developed an engine for the Arrow, although the project was scrapped before the engine was completed. Hines said that some Orenda employees never forgot about the project.

“They held an annual convention to celebrate, well, not celebrate, but commiserate the cancelling of the Arrow,” he recalled. “And all the devotees would bring their little mementos, which might be drawings or parts.”

There were a number of reasons blamed for the shutdown: cost was a major factor; the whole program from start to finish of production was estimated to cost approximately $ 1.1 billion. The recent change in Ottawa from the Liberals to the PCs was another. And while Avro Canada designed the aircraft at the height of the Cold War, they were unable to sign a buyer before the project was cancelled.

As high hopes for a bright and prosperous future in Canadian aviation plummeted, one of the brightest minds on the Arrow project, Jim Chamberlain, chief of technical design, and at least 30 other engineers left Canada for NASA. They would go on to join various projects at the space agency — Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.

“One thing in NASA that’s still remarked upon is the effect of the Avro group — that’s how they describe it,” Zuk said. “The influx of 32 or 33 new scientists was amazing. It changed everything from the Mercury Project to the Apollo. It helped put man on the moon.”

Jim Chamberlain led NASA to use a Lunar Orbit Rendezvous in the Apollo program, a key concept that let humans land on the moon and return to Earth.

“It’s the stuff that got into space that was attributed all the way back to the Avro group,” said Zuk.

Call it brain drain if you will, but the world has been beating a path to our door ever since. Silicon Valley technology companies continue to tap Canadian universities for our talent. A 2014 report by Riviera Partners, a San Francisco recruiting company, put the University of Waterloo second behind the University of California, Berkeley, in a list of schools that produce the most frequently hired students in the Bay area. Stanford, UCLA, and Cornell tied for third.