Loading ...Ah yes , our PM in 1958 , infamous for the Diefenbunker near Ottawa . Early in my career , I worked with a few engineers and techs who were caught up in the cancellation of the Arrow . There were two flying prototypes , and to prevent the project from being resurrected by Parliament , had them cut up overnight with cutting torches . One of the engineers told me that the big boss of AVRO came on the PA system about mid afternoon the day that the PM cancelled the project , and announced something to the effect that “The Arrow project has been cancelled today , so go home and do not return to work here…ever . You are all laid off.” Click !
That was one of the factors which prompted the ‘Brain Drain’ of talent from Canada to the USA. I benefitted from the attempts to bring technically trained people back to Canada who were educated in the USA . My field of study was high velocity flow , as in a Mach 2 wind tunnel I designed as a grad student , but after NASA put a man on the moon , it was mission accomplished so government contracts were terminated . In my senior year , I was pursued by many AeroSpace companies , but the next year , after pursuing grad work ( and building the wind tunnel) all offers dried up . One day , after having received negative replies from dozens of companies in the USA , I received an unsolicited offer from a research facility in Ontario , and jumped at the chance .
That was where I met the ex-AVRO folks . One , an engineer was quite a colorful character ( and the one who relayed the story of the Layoff announcement ) who was from a rather aristocratic family in Britain , and as a young man tooled around in a Bentley roadster . He also raced modified motorcycles , and as he approached retirement bought a hot Olds post-442 convertible with the W-series engine ( 454 cubic inches , I think ). That car today would be worth a mint at auction if kept in decent condition .