Victory at Malton

Avro Canada was born from a wartime shadow factory. At Malton, outside Toronto, Victory Aircraft had built 3,197 Ansons and 430 Lancasters for the RAF. In 1945 the minister C. D. Howe brokered its sale to Britain’s Hawker Siddeley, which created A. V. Roe Canada as an offshoot of its Avro subsidiary. Its first employee was Fred Smye, a Hamilton man who had run wartime Anson production. The new company began by repairing Lancasters, Mitchells and Sea Furies, but from the start it put a jet engine, a jet fighter and a jet airliner on its drawing boards at once.

Thirteen days behind the Comet

The airliner came first. The C102 Jetliner flew on 10 August 1949, only 25 months after design work began, and just 13 days after the de Havilland Comet, making it the second purpose-built jet airliner in the world. When Britain withheld the Avon engine for export, Avro switched to four heavier Derwents, and Trans-Canada Airlines lost interest. Howard Hughes leased the prototype, flew it himself in California and tried to buy 30 for TWA, but Avro could not build them. With the Korean War on, Howe ordered the work stopped to speed up the CF-100. The second prototype was scrapped in 1951; only the nose of the first survives, in Ottawa.

The Canuck guards the north

The CF-100 Canuck, Canada’s first home-designed jet fighter, flew on 19 January 1950 with Gloster’s Bill Waterton at the controls. It was a big, straight-winged, all-weather interceptor built to meet Soviet bombers over the Arctic under NORAD, and its Orenda engines came from Avro’s own engine division. On 18 December 1952 the Polish-born test pilot Janusz Żurakowski took a Mk 4 prototype through Mach 1 in a dive, and at Farnborough in 1955 he tumbled it through his famous falling-leaf display. In all 692 were built, including 53 for Belgium, and the last served the RCAF until 1981.

The Arrow and Black Friday

By 1958 A. V. Roe Canada had swollen into an empire of 44 companies, from Cape Breton coal to railway cars, with more than 50,000 employees and sales of about $450 million. Its crown jewel was the CF-105 Arrow, a delta-winged Mach 2 interceptor with fly-by-wire controls, rolled out on 4 October 1957, the day Sputnik went up. Żurakowski flew it on 25 March 1958, and one reached Mach 1.98. Then, on 20 February 1959, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker cancelled the Arrow and its Iroquois engine. 14,528 Avro employees lost their jobs that day, Black Friday, and within two months every aircraft, engine and jig was ordered scrapped.

Flying saucers and a brain drain

The company’s wilder side lived in John Frost’s Special Projects Group, a Canadian Skunk Works that designed saucer-shaped aircraft for the US Air Force. Only one flew: the US Army’s VZ-9 Avrocar, a flying jeep that could not rise more than about three feet off the ground and was cancelled in 1961. The Arrow’s collapse scattered its talent. Chief aerodynamicist Jim Chamberlin took 25 engineers to NASA’s Space Task Group, where they became leaders on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. In 1962 Hawker Siddeley dissolved A. V. Roe Canada, folded its assets into Hawker Siddeley Canada, closed Avro Aircraft and sold the Malton plant to de Havilland Canada.

Fábricas

• Malton works · Malton, Ontario — Ex-Victory Aircraft; sold to de Havilland Canada in 1962
• Orenda Engines · Malton, Ontario — Engine division across the airfield; built the Orenda and Iroquois

Gente

• Fred Smye · first employee, later Avro Aircraft head — Hired by Hawker Siddeley’s Roy Dobson in 1945
• Crawford Gordon · president from 1951 — Led the 1950s expansion into a 44-company group
• Janusz Żurakowski · chief development test pilot — Took the CF-100 supersonic in 1952 and flew the Arrow first in 1958
• John Frost · chief designer, Special Projects Group — Led the flying-saucer projects and the Avrocar
• Jim Chamberlin · chief aerodynamicist, CF-105 — Led 25 Avro engineers to NASA’s Space Task Group

Récords y primicias

• C102 Jetliner: second purpose-built jet airliner to fly, 13 days after the Comet
• CF-100: first straight-winged jet aircraft to achieve controlled supersonic flight, in a dive, 18 December 1952
• CF-105 Arrow: reached Mach 1.98 in testing