Monday, September 10, 2012

Everything Old is New Again


I’m always amused to find stories that indicate that for all of the talk of tradition, learning from the past, and trying not to repeat the mistakes of previous generations, no one can actually remember anything and the same old mistakes keep right on being made. There’s a lot of that going on in the news right now, since it’s a Presidential election year in the US, and a lot of the usual empty promises are being thrown around, but there was a story in the news this week that confirmed my belief that follies of this type are not limited to Americans, let alone American politicians. Apparently, some folks in Canada are trying to revive the Avro Arrow project of 1958…

You can find the original story on the Toronto Star website if you want to, but for anyone who isn’t particularly interested in the history of aircraft, the Arrow was a supersonic interceptor designed by Avro Canada during the Cold War as a counter-measure to Soviet strike aircraft attacking over the North Pole. Similar in concept (if not entirely in design) to the Convair delta-wing interceptors of the same era (the F-102 and F-106), the Arrow was an impressive piece of technology that would have equaled or exceeded the performance of all contemporary aircraft and would not have found a worthy opponent in Soviet service until the arrival of the Tupolev Tu-22 “Backfire” bomber nearly two decades later. However, like any other piece of cutting-edge technology, building a fleet of Arrows and working the bugs out of them would have been an expensive undertaking, and the Canadians elected to purchase a fleet of McDonnell-Douglas F-101s instead…

In most respects, that choice worked out very well for the Canadian Air Force. The F-101 turned out to be ideal for Canadian defensive requirements, and its adaptability for high-speed air-to-ground and very high-speed recon missions could only have been a plus. The downside – purchasing defense equipment from a foreign source, stunting the domestic aerospace industry’s growth in defense (and particularly supersonic) programs, and outsourcing all of the jobs involved to the US – remained a source of bitter contention for some years thereafter, but the loss of the actual aircraft doesn’t seem to have harmed the country or its national defense. It was a bit surprising to find a story about reviving the program as an alternative to the F-35 Lightning II turning up on one of the news aggregation sites…

Up until now, Canada has been one of the members of a constantly-shifting group of nations who intend to purchase the F-35, originally known as the Joint Strike Fighter, along with the United States Air Force. As with the F-16, F-18, F-15, F-5, F-111, F-101, F-104, C-130, A-4 and far too many other designs to bore you with, this arrangement should make it possible for a whole range of countries friendly to the US (or at least hostile to people we don’t like) to purchase cutting-edge war planes that they could never afford to develop on their own, while at the same time helping the American companies that produce the airplane to recover the cost of their R&D efforts and make more money into the bargain. Unfortunately, the F-35 has been delayed by technical problems, plagued by cost over-runs, and has thus far failed to live up to all but the most basic claims made for it – which is making it easy for people in Canada who oppose the project to come up with alternate suggestions. It’s just that this one was loony enough to raise eyebrows in anyone who has ever studied aircraft, history, or business…

For its time, the Arrow was a remarkable piece of engineering, and could have proved useful as a counter-measure to Cold War-era long-range strikes. But reviving the program now would mean producing a machine designed before the parents of most of its pilots were born to perform a mission long since made obsolete against an enemy who no longer exists. As an appeal to nationalists, voters who don’t particularly like Americans, or the Canadian domestic aerospace industry, this stunt might make sense from a political standpoint. And there is some precedent for it – the US has revived the U-2 and SR-71 aircraft for service, if not new construction. But the Arrow was cancelled in 1958 because it didn’t make military or economic sense, and today it represents more of a point of national pride than anything anyone would actually want to take into battle…

That doesn’t mean that someone won’t try it, however…

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