Friday, February 20, marked the 50th anniversary of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's decision to cancel the Avro Arrow, the jewel of the Canadian aviation industry, and a fallen star to many who see the plane's demise as symptomatic of this country's failed promise.

The passage of time has done little to dim the Arrow's appeal -- indeed, if anything, the plane seems to be almost as popular today as the day it was introduced to the public in 1957.

As one of the many researchers who has spent time looking at Arrow documents, the anniversary provides an opportunity to re-examine both the decision and its long-term consequences.

Military historians have long known that the plane was a paradox. While it was clearly an exceptional design and promised outstanding performance capabilities, it was dramatically over-budget and still in the early stages of its testing program at the time of cancellation. This latter factor has always made a definitive accounting of the project difficult, as the Arrow was still years away from production on "Black Friday."

Diefenbaker thus faced a classic "no-win" decision. To continue the venture would have resulted in the expenditure of several hundred more millions of dollars, even while it remained somewhat unclear what the Royal Canadian Air Force would ultimately receive in return. Indeed, by 1959, the Arrow had morphed into one of the largest industrial projects in Canadian history, and further changes made the prospect of additional cost overruns virtually certain (despite the company's last-minute attempt to guarantee production costs).

Technically, the plane was designed at a time when advances in propulsion, metallurgy and aerodynamics were occurring at a rapid rate, and it was these developments that were primarily to blame for the incessant changes to the Arrow over the course of its lifetime. As a point of fact, while it was not widely known at the time, in both the U.S. and the U.K. aircraft companies were grappling with many of the same issues, and both countries cancelled similar high-performance aircraft in the late 1950s and early '60s.

And yet, the decision to terminate not only gutted Canada's largest industrial company -- virtually all of Avro's 15,000 personnel were working on the Arrow in 1959 -- but also effectively decimated the country's aerospace sector, a blow from which it took decades to recover. In fact, it was not until Bombardier's success with its regional jet in the 1990s that one could legitimately speak of a globally competitive Canadian aircraft industry again. Thus, the costs of the decision were enormous, and for decades it appeared that the country's aviation base would never be restored. That said, the manner in which the decision was announced and carried out was disgraceful, and there is more than enough blame to go around. For starters, even though Avro had been put on notice in the fall of 1958 the project was likely to be cancelled, such was the company's misplaced confidence (or hubris) that it had made no contingency plans for this. As a result, within moments of the government's decision, Avro president Crawford Gordon took to the company's public address system in its sprawling Malton plant, and told all employees to go home, as they no longer had any work to do.

Perhaps the most senseless aspect of the entire episode was the decision to destroy all traces of the program, and to dismantle the six Arrows that had been largely completed. While the decision can be traced to fears of the Cold War and concerns over Soviet espionage (this coming just a little more than a decade after the Gouzenko affair), surely a more effective -- not to mention rational -- solution could have been found. To this day, the photograph of the Arrows sitting neatly on the tarmac in various stages of demolition remains burned in the nation's psyche, and one that many have looked on as "proof" of the conspiracy to destroy the plane.

Much has been written of the later success of many of the people who helped design and build the Arrow, dozens of whom went on to key positions in NASA and American defence companies. This success is a testament to the brilliance of many of Avro's personnel, and to the collective loss the country suffered when the company closed down for good a few years after the Arrow's cancellation.

In a final analysis, I'm of the opinion that the cancellation was regrettable, but largely justified because of strategic uncertainty and cost overruns. As noted, the plane was expensive, and there was legitimate uncertainty over the need for advanced interceptors in the coming decades (concerns that were misplaced, but widely shared at the time). Thus, I understand the reasoning behind the decision, even though it was never adequately explained by either the prime minister or his top officials.

However, in the late 1950s, aviation industries around the world were booming, and scrambling to keep up with the changes of the day. Canada was on the leading edge of these advances, and it had the good fortune to have a company that was among the top five of its kind in the world.

Assuming the project had gone ahead, in future years Avro would undoubtedly have built on the success of the Arrow, and would likely have become the centre of a powerful industry in Canada, one which offered to mix technical and engineering proficiency with academic and design excellence. Unfortunately, Diefenbaker's decision ended that dream, and in many ways the country has been searching for an alternative one ever since.

Andrew Richter is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Windsor, and the author of Avoiding Armageddon: Canadian Military Strategy and Nuclear Weapons, 1950-1963.

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