CAN THE TEAM THAT FOUND HMS EREBUS, FIND THE AVRO ARROWS?
The Avro Arrow was Canada’s aviation superstar of its day — before the program was scrapped and almost all trace of it destroyed. Nine unmanned prototypes were fired into Lake Ontario during testing. Now, 60 years later, the OEX Recovery group, in collaboration with the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, is heading into Lake Ontario to find them. Mitchell Thompson reports.
THE FLIGHT MODELS
Developed between 1953 and
1959 to counter Soviet bombers, the Avro Arrow was the first and final supersonic military plane designed and built in Canada. Between 1954 and 1957, nine threemetre- long Arrow models were fired at the lake to test its design for stability and shape for flight ability. When the project was scrapped in 1959, all other models were destroyed. “For political reasons, the entire project was cancelled. Thirty thousand people lost their jobs and the government destroyed all the drawings, models and burned everything so it wasn’t replicated. These models, at the bottom of Lake Ontario, are the only intact pieces of that whole program,” said David Shea of Kraken Sonar, the firm providing the technology to find the models.
FALLOUT
The Avro project was ground
breaking, said Karl Kenny, CEO of Kraken. “Back in the 1950s, there was no computer modelling to see how they’d fly, so the designers had to use a physical model. Then, it went back to the engineers for fine- tuning. The ninth model is the holy grail. They had it perfected.” With project cancellation, Shea said, the Iroquois engine, which had “significantly more thrust” than those in most other planes, was shelved. Much of the Canadian aerospace sector was shelved with it, as many of Avro’s best engineers went south to work on the Apollo program. John Burzynski, CEO of OEX, said, “A friend of mine bumped into some ex- Avro guys at a golf club down in Florida, a number of years ago, and he asked, ‘Did anything you used at Avro come into the space program?’ He said ‘ Why do you think the Challenger has a delta wing design?’”
EREBUS LINK
Kraken hel ped c omb icy
Nunavut waters for the wreck of HMS Erebus in 2014. With that kind of experience, Burzynski said he’s confident Kraken can find the models. “Searching Lake Ontario is a lot more straightforward than searching Arctic water. Lake Ontario is just one lake and there’s a certainty the models are there.”
THE SPOT
“Lake Ontario is a big lake,” Shea said, and previous searches f or the models failed. “You wonder if they missed it because they were in the wrong spot or if they just had the wrong technology. We ran three independent calculations from Point Petre, where the models were fired. Based on the angles, the thrust in the rockets and the trajectory, we found the ac- tual site was much closer to the shore than where everyone else had been looking.”
THE BOTTOM
Based on the distance of the site from the shore, Burzynski expects depths of 50 to 150 feet. “That’s a comfortable diving range,” he said. However, the team isn’t sure what condition the models will be in. “We don’t know what happened when the plane hit the water at 450 miles per hour, it could very well have disintegrated. But, on the other hand, our sonar equipment measures 3 cm by 3cm, so — even if it’s a trail of debris at the bottom of the lake — we can find it.”
THE SEARCH
Burzynski doesn’t expect a laborious search. Silt should be minimal, the water is clearer than in years past and “anything sharp or irregular will turn up on our sonar,” he said. Kraken expects to survey the water off Point Petre over two weeks and will start “as soon as the equipment reaches the site,” Kenny said. Burzynski isn’t so sure. “The Kraken guys are calling for a two-week search but that’s two weeks with 30 degree weather, no rain, no dead batteries, no one sleeping in or getting a punctured tire. I’d call that four weeks.” Burzynski said OEX hopes to find the first plane by end of August.