Team restores missing link in Avro Arrow story
With dental scalers and tweezers in hand, government conservators scrape and pluck zebra mussel detritus from a talismanic piece of Canadian aviation history.
Their painstaking work — there are thousands of hairlike filaments that have to be removed — is part of a federal effort to preserve what looks like a small rocket ship.
Bent and corroded, the threemetre projectile is unremarkable save for its triangular wings, which hint at a much larger, more consequential story.
Recovered last month from the bottom of Lake Ontario, the artifact is believed to be an early test model used in the Avro Arrow jet fighter program, which was halted by the government of prime minister John Diefenbaker on Feb. 20, 1959, a day that came to be known as Black Friday.
More than 14,000 Avro workers, including many highly skilled engineers, lost their jobs that afternoon.
By cabinet order, working prototypes of the supersonic jet were cut into pieces. Blueprints were destroyed to ensure Soviet spies could never copy them.
But some early test models from the program survived the purge since they were at the bottom of Lake Ontario.
The battered artifact now in a hangar behind the Canada Aviation and Space Museum is one of them.
It is a relic from the golden age of Canada’s aerospace industry, and museum officials hope it will one day form part of an exhibit that will take visitors through the design and testing of Canada’s starcrossed supersonic interceptor, the CF-105 Avro Arrow.
“I think everyone was very excited to see how much of it has survived despite 60-plus years under water,” says assistant curator Erin Gregory.
The relatively good condition of the artifact has raised hopes that a later test model from the Arrow program can be recovered intact.
Historians know that nine scale models of the Arrow were fired on booster rockets into Lake Ontario to test the airframe’s performance at supersonic speeds. All of the models were fired from a military launch pad with a fixed orientation.
The final five models were oneeighth sized replicas of the legendary fighter jet, immediately recognizable by its delta wing design.
“That’s the Holy Grail; finding one of those last five models,” says John Burzynski, leader of the Raise the Arrow team that has spent the past two summers scouring Lake Ontario.
The team has surveyed more than 60 square kilometres of lake bed using acoustic sonar, discovered a field of spent booster rockets and identified 1,200 potential targets for further exploration.
So far, only one artifact has been brought to the surface: the 158-kilogram relic now being stabilized and preserved in Ottawa. It was found about 4.5 kilometres southeast of Prince Edward County’s Point Petre.
Experts with the Canadian Conservation Institute have removed 16 kilograms of zebra mussels, mud and mussel excrement from the artifact.
The mussels were removed with a scalpel, but thousands of hairlike filaments ( byssal threads) remain, each of them firmly attached with a glue-like substance.
“We’ve cut away the mussels and now we’re very carefully picking away the last of the little hairy bits while leaving the paint intact,” explains Nancy Binnie, a senior conservation scientist at the institute, a special agency within the Department of Canadian Heritage.
The artifact is regularly sprayed with water so it doesn’t dry out, which could damage the orange paint that still colours its wings. It’s put to bed each night on wet sponges and covered in damp towels.
Once all of the mussel bits have been removed, conservators plan to “sand blast” it with particles of finely shaved dry ice. The process cleans the surface and removes corrosion without damaging it.
Eventually, the artifact will be dried in a controlled environment to prevent the paint from shrinking and flaking.
“We want to keep that paint: It’s really important to us,” Binnie says.
X-rays have revealed the artifact has telemetry components inside the fuselage, but conservators are still trying to figure out how best to open one of the two access ports to examine them.
Almost 60 years after its demise, the Avro Arrow still exerts a magnetic force on the imaginations of Canadians.
“I think the folklore around it is remarkable and quite unique in the world; this fervour over an airplane that was never actually taken on strength by our military,” Gregory says. “The idea of what could have been is what really sticks with people.”
The Arrow was a product of the Cold War. When the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear weapon in August 1949, it raised fears that jet bombers could one day deliver an atomic payload to North America.
The federal government decided that Canada needed a supersonic interceptor to meet that threat, and in July 1953, Avro Aircraft — the pioneering aviation division of A.V. Roe Canada Ltd. — was contracted to work on the project.
Without advanced computers, engineers built scale models to test the plane’s early designs and flight characteristics. The models were fired from a Point Petre missile range between 1954 and 1957.
It’s believed the relic pulled upside down from Lake Ontario on Aug. 12 was an early part of the Arrow program.
Known as a Delta Test Vehicle, it may have been used to assess the plane’s triangular wing design, or to test tracking systems for the launch of more sophisticated models.
“This is the first time we’ve had
tangible evidence of something from this test program,” says Binnie. “It’s very precious: It’s the first of its kind on land.”
Binnie has worked as a federal conservator for 33 years. She has been involved in four previous searches for the Arrow models, all of them unsuccessful. “I never thought I’d get to this point of it actually happening,” she says. “Everyone had the same vision of getting to this point, and here we are finally, finally, finally.”
John Burzynski says next year’s search season will concentrate on the area beyond the booster rocket field in an attempt to recover a later test model.
“I feel we’re very, very close now,” says Burzynski, chief executive of Toronto-based Osisko Mining Inc., one among a group of mining companies and financial institutions that are financing the search.
The Diefenbaker government shut down the Avro Arrow program because of spiralling costs and the emergence of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which could not be countered by fighter jets. The decision gutted Avro Canada, then the third-largest company in the country.
“It was actually a marvellous success, Burzynski says. “It just ended badly.”