Destroying a Legend

Photo supplied.
One day in May, 1959, Cavan resident Bob Maynard helped destroy an example of a pinnacle of Canadian aviation history.

One day in May of 1959, Bob Maynard, a sheet metal specialist with A. V. Roe Canada, was helping to build a flying saucer at the Malton factory just off Derry Road West. A man came into the work bay and asked to talk to him. Bob was known as an inventive man with a simple, practical approach to solving problems. Bob described his technique as using “the farmer’s solution” to most problems. He followed the man down to a bigger work bay at the other end of the complex.

A crew of workmen were crawling like bugs over an Avro Arrow. The man explained that these new-fangled “fly by wire” control cables were impossible to cut. Saws gummed up in the new plastic sheathing and torching them produced a thick toxic cloud. Could Bob use his high tech skills to solve the problem?   Bob shrugged and walked to a fire hose station, grabbed a fireman’s broad axe and climbed the nearest ladder onto the helpless Arrow.   With a couple mighty swings, the stubborn lines were severed. Disgusted, Bob climbed back down from what had been a great source of pride to him. Walking away he took one last look at the Avro CF-105 Arrow, the greatest pinnacle of Canadian aviation, a Canadian “moon-shot” if you will.   Canada dreamed it, designed it, built it … and then destroyed it.

Bob Maynard lives on a beautiful piece of land in the rolling hills of Cavan; a private piece of heaven that is close to good fishing holes, his other great interest. It’s been fifty-eight long years since Bob helped cut up the Arrow and that day still angers him. In Bob’s words, “We threw away what could have been an aviation based industry leading the world in aero-space development and employing thousands of highly skilled and highly paid workers.”

The politics of the time was as close-minded and backward as the engineering and designing was imaginative and forward thinking. Even though Avro Canada Ltd. had successfully flown a pre-production commercial jet and all-weather sub-sonic jet, the government that was footing the bill, forbade the company from investing any time or resources on a commercial aircraft capable of trans-Atlantic flight. C. D. Howe (Canada’s Minister of Everything) told Avro to concentrate on the C.F.-100 interceptor/fighter jet.

Possibly the strangest and saddest chapter in the Arrow saga was the decision to destroy everything related to the project. All the jigs, toolings, spare parts, the sub- assemblies, even the magnificent jets themselves were sold as scrap to Sam Lax, an Ancaster metal dealer, for $304,370. The government refused to sell any Arrows to the British government, who had made an offer to buy them. The $600,000,000.00 invested into the program was written off. Companies like NASA, Boeing, Lockheed and others snapped up the engineers and designers that created the Arrow. Many of these gifted people worked on the Apollo Moon program and some worked on the Concorde.   Possibly the greatest design team ever assembled in Canada was thrown to the wind. As for the Avro Jetliner, it had been ready to fly before the de Havilland Comet.   It would have been the first commercial jet to fly in the world, but it sat at Malton Airport for 2 weeks, while the airport runway was refinished. During that delay, while it sat ready to go, the British built “Comet” became the first jet in the air. In the end, the Comet suffered from structural issues that caused terrible crashes. Boeing and Douglas caught up and became the world’s leading passenger jet builders.

As for Bob Maynard, he was lured away from Avro in 1975 to work for A.E.C.L. (Atomic Energy ), the old-fashioned way, they doubled his salary to join their Sheridan Park Engineering lab. He did trouble shooting, was a pioneer in the use of remote cameras to inspect reactors and was called in at all hours to resolve urgent and difficult repair issues. Bob has much to be proud of being in the thick of two of Canada’s famous engineering endeavours (The Arrow and the Candu nuclear reactors). His has been a long a varied career, but after nearly 6 decades, he still gets angry about the day he had to take an axe to his beloved Arrow.

By Tony Parks

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