Meet the man who worked on infamously nixed Avro Arrow
As a sheet-metal mechanic, he worked on legendary projects such as ‘flying saucers,’ fighter jets and many secret programs
Michael Colangelo is likely among a small group of people who can boast they once worked on the legendary Avro Arrow fighter jet and a “flying saucer” — and also received a photo and thank-you letter from the prime minister, the man who cost him his high-paying job.
The just-turned-90-year-old, spry and chipper, talked to the Burlington Post recently in his lakeshore condo unit about his years working at A.V. Roe (Avro Canada) in Malton, just north of where Pearson airport is today, as a sheet-metal mechanic.
A bit of Canadian history is required in order to understand the heady, highstakes, high-tech environment Colangelo worked in for about 10 years starting in 1949.
In the early 1950s, Roe was the maker of an interceptor/fighter jet, the CF-100 Canuck, as well as the Avro C102 Jetliner, the second commercial jet airliner in the world.
Later came the Avrocar, the “flying saucer,” and, most famously, the CF-105, better known as the Avro Arrow.
The Arrow was an experimental deltawinged interceptor jet that was Canadian made and more advanced than any aircraft in the world, including what the Americans and Russians flew during the early years of the Cold War.
The Arrow reached Mach 1.98 (2,400 kilometres per hour), almost twice the speed of sound — and was touted as being able to easily exceed that. Six working prototypes were built.
The Arrow was being developed in earnest in 1957 and ’58 as a response to the possible threat of the Soviet Union attacking North America over the Canadian Arctic. The Arrow was unveiled on Oct. 4, 1957 — the same day the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite into space.
The Arrow program was infamously cancelled abruptly on Feb. 20, 1959, known as Black Friday, by Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker; millions of dollars had been spent on the project.
All vestiges of the planes and their plans were ordered destroyed. The completed planes and those partially assembled were cut up to be sold as scrap metal.
The project’s cancellation put tens of thousands of people out of work across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. Many of the brightest aircraft engineering and design minds, as well as skilled labourers, were scooped up by American aeronautical companies, including NASA, in a massive Canadian brain drain.
Colangelo says he’ll never forget that cold day in February 1959 when Crawford Gordon Jr., the president of A.V. Roe Canada, tore into Diefenbaker and his Conservative government for cancelling the Arrow project.
“He came on the (Avro’s Malton plant) loudspeaker and told all the workers, ‘That ---- prick in Ottawa (Diefenbaker).’ ”
Years later, in 1973, Colangelo said he was on a flight from Vancouver to Toronto and was introduced to the woman sitting beside him — Olive Diefenbaker, wife of the former PM.
He said they exchanged small talk at first. Then he felt compelled to tell her that he was still very upset, all those years later, with her husband for cancelling the Arrow project.
Several weeks later he received a letter from the House of Commons, on then MP John Diefenbaker’s letterhead, thanking him for his talk with his wife. A photo of the Diefenbakers with their pet dog was included. He still has it.
Colangelo said unemployment after the Arrow was, thankfully for him, short-lived. Two days after being laid off he got a call from Avro’s personnel manager, Jack Nesbitt, who told him, ‘Mike, you’re working on the flying saucer, so you can come back to work.’ ”
So Colangelo continued to work his sheet metal magic for Avro Canada. It was done at the Orenda Engine’s test site that was just a short walk from the Avro plant.
Just as he did with the Arrow, Colangelo worked on producing engine blades for the Avrocar, also known as the “flying saucer.”
He said he saw both aircraft rolled out of hangars in Malton and taken for test flights at various times.
He remembers seeing Arrow chief test pilot Jan Zurakowski, the first to fly it, saving the Arrow from severe damage on one test flight by landing it safely when its wheels wouldn’t deploy.
In the case of the flying saucer, a U.S. army secret project, it was a lot less impressive than the majestic Arrow.
The Avrocar was a large silver disc — nearly eight metres in diameter and 1.6 metres tall — with U.S. military markings; it looked like the stereotypical flying saucer of science fiction pulp books and B movies. It was essentially a hovercraft designed to take off and land vertically.
“I did work on the saucer blades. I was present for the tests on the tarmac. It was tied to guide wires and then the pilot performed various manoeuvres,” Colangelo recalled.
Unfortunately, the saucer did little flying as it could barely get one metre off the ground and wobbled noticeably.
The American military spent more than $7 million on the project and then cancelled it in September 1959. Colangelo was out of work, again, after a sevenmonth reprieve.
When he started at Avro he made 90 cents an hour; by the end he was making more than $7 an hour, a very good wage in the late 1950s.
In 1944, at age 16, already with his driver’s licence, he was making 75 cents an hour learning the home oil heating trade.
At 18, he was introduced to Jack Swanson, the foreman of the machine shop at A.V. Roe.
After joining Roe, later on he worked with Jack Mashinter who ran the five-man experimental department in Malton.
A six-year apprenticeship culminated in Colangelo becoming a sheet metal mechanic. From 1955 on he worked simultaneously on the Arrow and the flying saucer.
“I was working with titanium, which was new at the time; it was lighter and stronger than steel. I worked on (making) engine blades. I was making things just from a sketch. I would weld or solder whatever.”
History says that the work being done at A.V. Roe, particularly on the Arrow, was top secret at the time, but Colangelo says it didn’t seem that way, at least not for him.
“I could talk about it at any time with anybody. I had (security) clearance from the RCMP and the FBI. You had to have special clearance for the engine (testing) area.”
The treasurer of the Avro Museum, housed at the Springbank Airport in Calgary, said security might have appeared to be light for some workers at the Malton assembly plant but that it was noticeable in many respects.
“Security at Avro Canada would be considered high by any measure,” Mike Ward said in an email to the Post.
“The top secret information related to many of the manufacturing processes, aircraft design as well as the ‘fly-by-wire’ (computerized flight regulation) technology,” Ward noted.
“This was way ahead of any other technology being used anywhere else in the world. Access to this material was restricted to senior engineering and manufacturing staff. Some of these staff had high enough clearance to be allowed to take material (drawings, etc.) out of the factory to work on it at home, which is why, when the hammer fell, some of these drawings and materials were not captured by the destruction orders that came later.
“The destruction order was put in place and executed to ensure that no one else could get their hands on the advanced technology that Avro Arrow aircraft design encompassed. The destruction included all the finished aircraft, about 30 partially finished aircraft on the production line as well as all the manufacturing equipment that, in most cases, had been designed and built specifically for the Avro Arrow and some of the (at the time) exotic materials, like titanium, that were used in the factories.”
Ward said not all documentation was destroyed and that the Avro Museum has one of the most extensive collections of Avro Canada documents with more than 15,000 pages and various drawings, which they are in the process of organizing so it can be uploaded to its website for access by the public.