Frank Harvey's group, the Aerospace Heritage Foundation of Canada, searched the bottom of Lake Ontario for three days and couldn't find an Arrow anywhere. But disappointment is nothing new to this bunch. The Avro Arrow was Canada's fighter-interceptor effort (see "Fallen Arrow," April/May 1998). Designed in the 1950s, the ultra-modern fighter (with fly-by-wire controls, 25 years before they became a standard feature on U.S. fighters) had an estimated top speed in excess of Mach 2. A.V. Roe Canada built six before hideous cost overruns and politics shot the project down. An oddly vindictive Canadian government decreed that all evidence of the Arrow be eradicated. "They ordered that all pictures, film, everything, was supposed to be destroyed," says Harvey. The prototypes were dismantled, and the photographs, designs, drawings, and test data confiscated from the engineers.
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