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The F-35 Debate Is Really about How We Killed the Avro Arrow
Canada doesn’t talk about the Avro Arrow because it’s nostalgic. It talks about the Arrow because it’s unfinished business. Every time Ottawa finds itself boxed in on defence procurement, every time the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) tries to remind Canada who it thinks really owns North American air power, the Arrow reappears. It doesn’t show up as an engineering debate or a budget line. It shows up as a question of sovereignty.
Who decides what flies over Canada, who maintains it, who upgrades it, and who gets the final say when politics intrudes on defence?
Right now, that question is back on the table. Canada is reviewing whether to proceed with the full purchase of eighty-eight F-35s, having paid for only the first sixteen. Alternatives are being openly discussed. Saab’s Gripen is back in the conversation. France’s Rafale lurks on the margins. And hovering above all of it is an unmistakable warning from Washington: if Canada walks away from the F-35, the United States will “fill the gaps,” even if that means American fighters flying more often in Canadian airspace and changes to NORAD itself.
That kind of pressure has a way of waking old ghosts. The Avro Arrow is the loudest one. To understand why the Arrow still matters, you have to strip away the mythology and look at what it actually was.
In the early 1950s, Canada faced a strategic reality that’s easy to forget today. The shortest route for Soviet bombers carrying nuclear weapons to reach American cities ran straight over the Canadian Arctic. Canada wasn’t a junior partner in continental defence. It was the forward line, much like Ukraine or the Baltics are today.
The Royal Canadian Air Force initially tried to stretch the life of the CF-100 Canuck, a solid but subsonic interceptor jet. That effort ran into physics. You can only ask so much from an airframe designed for an earlier threat environment.
By 1953, the RCAF issued Specification AIR 7-3, a document that reads like something written by a country that took its own defence seriously. The new interceptor needed to reach Mach 1.5 at 50,000 feet within minutes of takeoff. It needed long range, rapid turnaround, and the ability to operate from relatively short runways scattered across a vast, cold country.
The RCAF surveyed American, British, and French designs and concluded that nothing on offer met the requirement. So, Canada decided to build its own.
That decision alone placed Canada in rare company. Designing a front-line interceptor from scratch is something only a handful of nations have ever done successfully. It requires industrial depth, political will, and a tolerance for risk that democracies often struggle to maintain.
Avro Canada took on the challenge.
The CF-105 Arrow was not “ahead of its time” in the lazy way that phrase often gets used. It was simply advanced, full stop. The aircraft featured a large delta wing optimized for high-speed, high-altitude flight. It was designed for a two-person crew, integrated advanced avionics for its era, and was intended to carry sophisticated radar-guided weapons.
Avro engineers pioneered early fly-by-wire concepts, integrated computerized navigation systems, and worked with materials and manufacturing techniques that pushed Canada’s industrial base to its limits.
The Arrow was so ambitious that Canada didn’t even have the facilities to test all aspects of it domestically. Avro relied on American test ranges and research infrastructure, including National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics facilities in the United States.
That dependence would later feed conspiracy theories, but at the time, it was simply practical reality. Canada did not yet have the wind tunnels, materials labs, high-altitude test ranges, or engine-test infrastructure needed to validate an aircraft operating at the very edge of what mid-1950s aerodynamics and metallurgy would allow.
Avro engineers leaned on American facilities and suppliers because that’s where the tools were. US test centres had already been built for exactly this kind of work, and American firms dominated key subsystems, from interim engines to avionics components.
None of that implied sabotage or covert pressure in the moment. It meant that Canada was trying to build a world-class interceptor inside a North American aerospace ecosystem that was already deeply integrated, asymmetric, and tilted south.
The Arrow rolled out publicly in October 1957. On the same day, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. History has a sense of irony.
The aircraft flew in March 1958. It went supersonic early in its test program. Problems existed, as they always do in developmental aircraft, but nothing catastrophic.
By early 1959, several prototypes were flying, and production-standard Mk2 aircraft with the Canadian-designed Orenda Iroquois engines were nearing readiness. Canada was, briefly, on the cusp of fielding one of the most advanced interceptors in the world. It flew sixty-six flights, totalling just over seventy flight hours. Then it stopped.
On February 20, 1959, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s government cancelled the Arrow and the Iroquois engine program. That date is still known as “Black Friday” in Canadian aerospace circles. (Not to be confused with the Black Friday corporate retail fuck fest where we convince ourselves in the States that we need another 70-inch LCD TV.)
The reasons were not mysterious, even if they remain controversial.
The Arrow was expensive. Canada was also being asked to invest in missile defence systems and to integrate more deeply into NORAD, which had just been formalized with the United States. At the same time, strategic thinking in Washington was shifting toward intercontinental ballistic missiles as the dominant threat, reducing the perceived value of manned interceptors in some circles.
Canada could not afford everything. The Diefenbaker government chose a path that favoured missiles, alliance integration, and cost control over domestic aerospace ambition.
That decision alone would have been painful but survivable. What followed was something else entirely.
After cancelling the Arrow, the government ordered the destruction of the prototypes, tooling, and a vast amount of program material. Airframes were cut up. Blueprints were destroyed. The program was erased with a thoroughness that shocked even people who supported the cancellation.
This is the moment where the Arrow stopped being just an aircraft and became a national trauma.
Governments cancel defence programs all the time. But they don’t usually take a torch to them in public. The destruction denied engineers, historians, and the public any chance to process the decision rationally. It also fuelled suspicion. When you destroy something that aggressively, people assume you’re hiding something.
Thousands of skilled workers lost their jobs overnight. Many left Canada entirely. A significant number went on to work in the United States, including on National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) programs.
Canada didn’t just lose a jet. It lost a generation of aerospace momentum. And it lost confidence, temporarily.
And yet, to this day, some Canadians still ask: Did the United States sabotage the Arrow? This is the question that never dies, and it deserves a sober answer.
There is no credible evidence that the United States covertly sabotaged the Arrow program. No smoking gun documents. No declassified memos ordering its destruction. No operational footprint that holds up under scrutiny.
The Arrow did not need to be sabotaged. It was politically vulnerable on its own.
That does not mean the US was indifferent. Washington benefited enormously from the Arrow’s cancellation. Canada became more dependent on American aircraft, American weapons integration, and American sustainment pipelines. NORAD became more asymmetrical. The industrial and strategic leverage shifted south.
That’s not sabotage. That’s just Cold War geopolitics.
The United States didn’t have to destroy the Arrow. Canada did it to itself, under pressure that was real but not coercive in the cinematic sense. Middle powers often make these choices. They rarely like the long-term consequences.
Some say the Arrow still exists, perhaps spirited away by MI6 to a remote base in Scotland . . . Look, I get it. The rumours about a surviving Arrow are emotionally understandable. They offer a way out. If the Arrow wasn’t truly destroyed, then the decision feels less final.
There is evidence that some documents and components survived. Engineers hid blueprints. Parts surfaced decades later. That’s human behaviour in the face of bureaucratic destruction. But the idea of a complete Arrow airframe surviving in secret for decades collapses under its own weight. Aircraft leave trails. Maintenance records, photographs, eyewitnesses, logistics chains. None of that has surfaced in a way that stands up to scrutiny.
But make no mistake; the Arrow still matters in 2026, and Canadians should be proud. If the Arrow were just an old jet, it would be a museum piece. Instead, it keeps coming back because Canada never replaced what it lost.
France did. Sweden did. France chose to preserve an independent combat aircraft capability through programs like Mirage, Rafale, and now its Future Combat Air System ambitions. Sweden evolved its Gripen line, through the Draken, accepting trade-offs but retaining control.
Canada walked away from that path in 1959 and never returned. Every fighter since has been imported. Every decision has involved trade-offs between capability, cost, and political alignment.
That’s why the current F-35 debate feels different. It’s not just about whether the jet is good. It’s about whether Canada is comfortable with the level of dependence that comes with it. The F-35 is not just an aircraft. It’s a system of systems. Software updates, mission data files, sustainment logistics, and upgrade pathways are all tightly controlled within an American-led ecosystem.
That’s fine when politics align. It’s catastrophic when they don’t.
The Arrow was not perfect. It was expensive. It might have struggled to survive budget realities even if it hadn’t been cancelled. It existed in a strategic environment that was changing rapidly. But its cancellation locked Canada into a permanent position as a customer rather than a designer in the highest tier of military aviation.
That choice echoes. Every time Canada debates whether it can say no to Washington, the answer is shaped by what Canada can and cannot build on its own. Sovereignty isn’t just flags and borders. It’s industrial capability, supply chains, and the ability to absorb political friction without losing operational control.
Canada gave that up in 1959. The Arrow wasn’t stolen. It wasn’t smuggled away in the night. It wasn’t quietly dismantled by American agents. It was surrendered, cleanly and decisively, by a government that chose the path of least resistance and paid a price it didn’t fully understand at the time.
That price is still being paid, one procurement cycle at a time. And that’s why, every time Canada’s fighter future becomes a bargaining chip, the Arrow rises from the wreckage and asks the same question it’s been asking for sixty-six years. Who really controls Canada’s skies?
Originally published as “Canada’s Lost Fighter Jet and the Price of Dependence” by Wes O’Donnell (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.
The post The F-35 Debate Is Really about How We Killed the Avro Arrow first appeared on The Walrus.
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