The Canuck was born from a 1946 RCAF requirement for a long-range, twin-engined, radar-equipped all-weather interceptor able to defend Canada’s vast, thinly-populated north in any conditions. No foreign type quite fit, and Canada’s wartime aircraft industry was looking for a peacetime future, so the newly-formed Avro Canada was handed the job of designing the country’s first jet fighter from scratch.

The programme was ambitious for a nation that had never designed a jet combat aircraft, and the early flight-test phase was troubled. But the aircraft that emerged was a genuine success on its own terms: rugged, roomy, well-suited to Arctic operations, and built around the radar and fire-control system that were its real weapons. That it was also home-grown — airframe and Orenda engines both Canadian — made it a point of national pride.

On 18 December 1952, Avro Canada’s chief development test pilot Janusz Zurakowski — a Polish-born wartime RAF pilot and famed aerobatic display flyer — took a CF-100 into a dive and pushed it past the speed of sound. Because the Canuck had a conventional straight wing rather than the swept wing then thought necessary for supersonic flight, the achievement is widely cited as the first time a straight-winged jet aircraft exceeded Mach 1 in controlled flight.

It was a dive, not level flight — the Canuck was never a supersonic aircraft in service — but it demonstrated the strength of the airframe and the skill of Avro’s test team, and it burnished the reputation of an interceptor that critics had written off as a heavy, plodding “Lead Sled.”

Early Canucks mixed guns and rockets: the Mk 4 carried a belly pack of eight 0.50-in machine guns alongside its rocket pods. The final production model, the Mk 5, took the concept to its logical end — it deleted the gun pack entirely and relied solely on unguided 2.75-inch “Mighty Mouse” folding-fin rockets carried in the wingtip pods, roughly 58 in total.

The Mk 5 also gained extended wingtips and tailplane to improve handling and reach at high altitude, where the bombers it hunted flew. The idea was blunt but effective for the era: get the radar onto a target in the dark, then empty a wall of rockets into its path on a single firing pass, trading pinpoint accuracy for sheer volume of fire.

As a Canadian government procurement of the early 1950s, the Canuck never carried a modern-style flyaway sticker price, and published figures are scarce. Period estimates place the unit cost on the order of CA$1 million in 1950s dollars — a substantial sum reflecting the aircraft’s size and its expensive radar and fire-control electronics. That figure should be read as an order-of-magnitude estimate, not a sourced flyaway price.

No reliable public cost-per-flight-hour number exists for the type. As with most first-generation Cold War interceptors, operating-cost data was never published in a form comparable to modern figures, so any precise dollar-per-hour claim for the CF-100 is effectively a guess.