‘Raise the Arrow’ mission underway

A mission to find nine models of the Avro Arrow — an advanced Canadian jet fighter that was controversially cancelled in 1959 — began Friday with a submarine scouring the waters of Lake Ontario in search of the freeflight prototypes.

The models were launched from a military base in the 1950s as part of the development of the Avro Arrow, the first and only supersonic interceptor built by the Canadian military in the 1950s to counter potential Soviet bomber attacks in North America’s Arctic.

If t he models are recovered, they will find new homes at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa and the National Air Force Museum of Canada in Trenton, Ont.

The expedition, dubbed Raise the Arrow, is being led by John Burzynski, head of OEX Recovery Group Inc., which created the searchand-recovery project as part of Canada 150 celebrations and to coincide with next year’s 60th anniversary of Avro Arrow’s first test flight.

A programmable submarine supplied by Kraken Sonar Inc. spent eight hours Friday surveying an area just off Point Petre in Ontario’s Pri nce Edward County where it’s believed the missing free- flight prototypes were launched from.

Burzynski said he came up with the project after following news reports of Kraken’s involvement in recovering one of the ships belonging to the Franklin Expedition of 1845.

David Shea, Kraken’s vicepresident of engineering, was part of the five- person crew, following the submarine on a boat to make sure no one navigated over it.

The submarine is equipped with a militarygrade sonar, which records acoustic data at a range of 300 metres and turns it into a high- resolution acoustic image, Shea told The Canadian Press in an interview from the boat on Friday.

They have 64 square kilometres to cover and Burzynski said it’s likely the models will be among a lot of debris, which could include shipwrecks from the 1700s and 1800s and two planes that crashed in 1945 and 1960.

The search is expected to take two weeks, but could be extended to a month due to weather or other factors.

If the models are located, project archeologist Scarlett Janusas said she will send divers down to check on the integrity of the prototypes.

“I hope that they will be in one piece, but it’s unlikely,” she said while on site at Point Petre. “We have to make sure that the structures are totally supported as we are bringing them out of the water, so they don’t collapse on themselves,” Janusas said.