The cancellation on 20 February 1959 was abrupt and total. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker announced in the House of Commons that the Arrow and its Iroquois engine were finished, and Avro dismissed its workforce the same afternoon. The official reasons were cost and strategy: the programme was expensive, the RCAF was the only customer, and defence thinking was moving toward the Bomarc surface-to-air missile and the belief that the manned bomber threat was fading.

What turned a cancellation into a national trauma was what followed. In the weeks after, orders came to physically destroy everything — the flying prototypes, the airframes on the line, the jigs, drawings and tooling. Crews torched the aircraft apart and sold the metal for scrap. No complete Arrow was preserved. The most-repeated explanation is that the destruction was meant to prevent classified technology from leaking, though the thoroughness of it has fed suspicion and myth ever since. All that survives today are fragments — most notably the nose section of the unfinished Mk 2 aircraft RL-206, now at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa.

The Arrow was designed to fight as a system, not just as an airframe. Its flight controls were signalled electronically to the hydraulic actuators — an early form of fly-by-wire with mechanical backup — and it was to be paired with the American RCA-Victor Astra fire-control system and Sparrow missiles. That avionics-and-weapons package was one of the biggest drivers of cost and delay. When the government looked at the total programme bill, the electronics were a large part of what made the Arrow look unaffordable, and the Astra/Sparrow combination had already been dropped in favour of a simpler system before the end came.

The Orenda Iroquois was an extraordinary achievement for a country of Canada’s size — a large, titanium-rich afterburning turbojet in the same power class as the best American engines of the late 1950s. It was flight-tested slung under the fuselage of a modified B-47 bomber. The Mk 1 Arrows flew on interim Pratt & Whitney J75 engines while the Iroquois matured; the Mk 2, with Iroquois power, was expected to be genuinely faster. Both engine and aircraft were cancelled together on 20 February 1959, and the completed Iroquois engines were scrapped.

There is no reliable single flyaway price for the Arrow, because it never reached series production and its cost was a moving target. The programme — aircraft plus the Iroquois engine and the troubled Astra/Sparrow weapons system — ran to roughly a billion late-1950s dollars, and projected per-aircraft costs climbed steeply as the export market failed to appear and the RCAF remained the only customer. The Diefenbaker government pointed to those rising costs, and to a strategic bet on the Bomarc missile, as the core justification for cancellation. Any precise dollar-per-Arrow figure you see should be read as an estimate shaped by which costs are counted.