A Hastings County Historical Society and Belleville Public Library Zoom Presentation.
John Burzynski is head of OEX Recovery Group that found test models of the Avro Arrow Jet in Lake Ontario off Point Petre. He will talk about this important discovery on Wednesday, January 19th.
As part of the engineering work to design the Avro Arrow in the mid-1950’s, a flight test program was conducted at Point Petre in Prince Edward County. A series of 1/8th scale Arrow models were launched into Lake Ontario on booster rockets to study their flight characteristics at Mach speeds. The models weren’t recovered at the time, and remain as some of the only vestiges of the Arrow program that were not destroyed upon its subsequent cancellation in February 1959.
For over 30 years different search teams had looked for the elusive “lost Arrows” on the bed of Lake Ontario without success. The OEX Recovery Group was formed in 2017 to continue the search, and over the summers of 2017 to 2020 conducted modern sonar and used remotely operated vehicles (ROV) to conduct target investigation, and ultimately raised one of the early test models using dive teams. The search concluded in the fall of 2020, with the discovery and imaging of the resting place of one of the final test models of the series.
The Avro Arrow
The Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow was a delta-winged interceptor aircraft designed and built by Avro Canada. The CF-105 promised Mach 2 speeds at altitudes above 50,000 feet (15,000 m) and was intended to serve as the Royal Canadian Air Force’s (RCAF) primary interceptor into the 1960s and beyond. On March 25, 1958, flight testing began, and the design quickly demonstrated excellent handling and overall performance, reaching Mach 1.9 in level flight.
Arrow models were launched into Lake Ontario to test their maneuverability at high speeds. These were not recovered at the time, and many exhibitions to find them have taken place over the last several years, but unfortunately, they have never been recovered.
Related: The Scuba News Canada article on the Avro Arrow
On February 20, 1959, Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker abruptly halted development of both the Arrow and its Iroquois engines before the scheduled project review to evaluate if the program could take place. Canada attempted to sell the Arrow to the United States and the United Kingdom, but no agreements were reached. The assembly line, tooling, plans, existing airframes, and engines were ordered to be destroyed two months later.
Raise the Arrow Project
Zoom Presentation January 19, 2021 @ 3pm
This upcoming Zoom presentation is free, but you must register in advance to attend:
https://us02web.zoom.us/…/reg…/WN_Z6Yvy2MyT9Gn-mEMP8woVw
