EvanL
06-24-2004, 03:27 PM
By Derek Baldwin
Local News - Thursday, June 24, 2004 @ 07:00
Two Canadian warships have arrived in Kingston waters on a hunt for historical gold in Lake Ontario.
HMCS Kingston and HMCS Glace Bay, 55-metre-long coastal defence vessels, cruised past Kingston on Tuesday and will focus their search in coming days in the waters off Prince Edward County.
The ships, outfitted with high-tech underwater scanning gear, a remote vehicle and the navy’s best divers, will launch an ambitious underwater expedition in search of nine jet fighter aircraft models believed to lie on the lakebed.
The models of the ill-fated Avro Arrow are important, given they’re virtually all that remains of the dream to dominate the skies with made-in-Canada jet fighter technology some say was ahead of its time in the 1950s.
The mission marks the first government-backed attempt to find the models, baby Arrows that historians and treasure hunters view as priceless gems awaiting restoration and display in museums across Canada.
Many private expeditions have failed to find the models, believed mired in the lake bottom since the 1950s.
The models, three metres long and two metres wide, were launched over the lake during the design and test phases.
Electronic data recorded from the models helped Arrow designers tweak elements of the plane’s radical design.
As the models screamed through the air at nearly twice the speed of sound, the data furnished military and aviation scientists with reliable data on the plane’s stability that helped in the creation of the full-sized aircraft handcrafted by more than 14,000 workers at A.V. Roe plant in Malton, Ont.
The plane turned heads around the world when its swept-wing design was launched into the skies over Ontario in 1957.
Less than two years after its rollout, then prime minister John Diefenbaker ordered 11 existing planes assembled in the Malton plant – five of which were airworthy – destroyed.
Should one or more intact models be recovered, it would be as close as anyone can come to resurrecting an Arrow.
The two warships are en route to a patch of search waters to be plumbed in early July using sonar devices that will sweep the featureless lake bottom for signs of the models.
Lt.-Cmdr. Scott Healey, commanding officer of HMCS Glace Bay and a Kingston native, said yesterday that Maritime Forces Atlantic is throwing all it can muster at the sunken treasures to identify and retrieve the items from the lakebed.
The ships will be assisted by the Trinity route survey office and the Canadian navy’s fleet diving unit from the Atlantic region.
“We do have all of the gear aboard we’ll need,” said Healey, in a cellphone interview with The Whig-Standard from aboard HMCS Glace Bay.
“We’re just waiting for some clarification on personnel issues.”
Following routine navigation and training exercises in the lake, including a Canada Day weekend visit to Kingston, Healey said both ships will embark on a systematic three-day sweep of waters where the mini Arrows are believed to have splashed down after being fired into the drink from a Canadian Forces launch pad at Point Petre in the southwest corner of Prince Edward County.
“We want to be on station for Monday [July 5],” Healey said. “We will have the side-scan ready first thing Monday morning.”
After conducting their sweep and registering possible targets below the lake surface, Healey said they’ll send in remote operating vehicles to investigate hits registered by the sonar.
The unmanned remote vehicle is called the Phantom and can plunge into very deep waters via expert manipulation from the surface. Live camera images will be relayed from the Phantom to monitors aboard the navy vessels.
“We’ll do Phantom diving in the lake the next day,” Healey said.
When the Arrow program was scrapped in 1959, workers were ordered to hack apart the existing jet fighters.
All things related to the Arrow were also ordered destroyed, including tool dies, design specifications, blueprints and castings.
The destructive reach of the Canadian government and military didn’t extend to the baby Arrows believed buried 70 metres deep in Lake Ontario.
Lou McPherson, 89, is a retired A.V. Roe welder who worked with the company for 27 years.
In an interview yesterday with The Whig, he remembered vividly from his Downsview home the disbelief of his fellow workers as he followed his orders and began cutting the planes to pieces with a welding torch almost 50 years ago.
He cut the nose of one plane completely off, an act that only days before the order would have seemed unthinkable.
“I hated the job of cutting them up but we were ordered to do it,” he said.
“The planes were cut to pieces and I never saved a single piece for a souvenir. We certainly had a good cutting time, shall we say.”
McPherson said he has never understood why a single plane wasn’t saved for posterity.
“Why they never saved one for a museum I’ll never know,” he said.
He said he’s glad to hear that the Canadian military was “finally coming to its senses to save at least something of the Arrow. It would be nice to find them [model Arrows], clean them and put them in a museum.They have a good museum in Trenton and its nearby. The RCAF Museum would be a good place for people to remember the Arrow.”
Not only is the RCAF Memorial Museum near the underwater location of the baby Arrows, it’s also on the grounds of CFB Trenton, the only runway where the Arrow landed away from Malton on one of its many test flights.
The interceptor was forced to an alternate landing because the runway at Malton was reportedly blocked thanks to a wheels-up crash of another aircraft.
The Arrow landed in Trenton on Feb. 2, 1959, only 18 days before the project was abandoned.
Jim Gartshore lives near the Trenton airbase on Highway 2.
He worked on the Orenda engines for the Arrow in Malton.
He told The Whig yesterday he still resents the Conservative government of the day for leaving such a sad legacy for Canadians to ponder.
Gartshore, 76, said he still has conversations with retired A.V. Roe friends and those retired from the Canadian Air Force, all of whom lament the loss of what they believe could’ve been the genesis of a major aircraft industry in Canada.
“Pretty well everyone I know is still very angry about it,” said Gartshore. “They just killed any chance we had at an aircraft industry here at home. No one ever explained to us why they did it. They just did it. I’ve washed my hands of it I’m so disgusted.”
Gartshore said he had mixed feelings at news of the government’s attempt to retrieve the Arrows.
“It’s about time. Finally, they’re going to start looking for these things,” said Gartshore. “I don’t know why they’ve waited so long.”
His son, Dave Gartshore, has grown up listening to the tales of the Arrow’s death and said he’s fascinated about the unwillingness of Canadians to forget the plane.
Dave Gartshore spent a great deal of time and money in a race with other private groups from Toronto and London, Ont., to find the first documented mini Arrow.
In 1999, he was reported to have found one of the Arrow models in deep water about seven kilometres off the southeast tip of Prince Edward County.
His video footage of the metal anomaly discovered on the lakebed by side-scan sonar was confirmed by so-called Arrow experts who compared the images to known blueprints of the models.
Last fall, Gartshore teamed with experts from the well-known shipwreck hunting television show The Sea Hunters and revisited the site of the anomaly.
What Gartshore believed was the first baby Arrow to be found, it’s now believed, was a Velvet Glove missile fired from the same Point Petre launch pad in the early 1950s by the Canadian military.
He welcomed the search by the Canadian navy to find baby Arrow artifacts that have remained so elusive for so many years.
The search, he speculated, may be now underway by the military because of pressure and publicity from private searchers such as himself.
“I’m very pleased the Canadian government is finally getting around to this,” he said. “All I’ve ever cared about is getting them up from the bottom before they disintegrate and are of no good to anyone. I just want these to be in museums for our younger generations to remember what happened so many years ago.”
Gartshore said he has made several pitches to the National Defence to find the Arrows and put them on display at RCAF Memorial Museum in Trenton.
The models are made of magnesium and titanium alloys, metals that can disintegrate if exposed to water for long periods of time, he said.
There were other special characteristics of the models, especially given the limited aeronautical science of the time, he said.
Every model was built to one-eighth scale, weighed about 225 kilograms (500 pounds) and contained two dozen sensors that transmitted critical data, such as air flow along all of the aircraft surfaces, back to scientists on land before the models crashed into the lake.
To shoot skyward, the models were piggybacked on missiles that generated about 45,000 pounds of thrust and propelled both model and missile to a velocity of up to 2,500 kilometres per hour.
When launched, the models were tracked using an FM telemetering system, cameras and radar.
In an interview from his Ottawa home last night, one of Canada’s leading Arrow experts and authors, Palmiro Campagna, said that data suggests the models could lay in waters eight kilometres to 40 kilometres from the launch pad.
“It’s akin to searching for a needle in a haystack,” said Campagna, whose latest of many books on the Arrow, Requiem for a Giant, A.V. Roe Canada and the Avro Arrow, was released in April.
He questioned whether the military will be able to find any of the models using side scan sonar because the technology records images in a sideways fashion. The arrow models may be buried and not easily detected by the sonar.
He suggested that the military might be better off to use what’s called a magnetometer, a device that is also towed behind the ship but has a greater discovery ability because it can detect metals even if they are buried in the sandy lake bottom.
Campagna said he was excited to learn that the military is finally investing time and energy to help find a vital piece of Canadian history feared lost forever.
“People think Diefenbaker put an end to the Arrow but it was the military that ordered everything to be destroyed,” he said. “We don’t know what the reason was to this day. Everything was destroyed except a few pieces we see in museums and the models, if they still exist in Lake Ontario.”
The irony of the military ramping up to search for the models wasn’t lost on Campagna.
After destroying the plane in its infancy, Campagna said “it is very ironic the military is trying to recapture lost history to undo the wrong.”
Even if the search is successful and every model is found in Lake Ontario, there will always remain some Arrow models that may never be found.
While nine were shot into Lake Ontario from 1954 to 1957 at the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment at Point Petre, two other were fired into the Atlantic Ocean from Wallops Island range in Virginia.
Those two models have never been found, Campagna said.
Local News - Thursday, June 24, 2004 @ 07:00
Two Canadian warships have arrived in Kingston waters on a hunt for historical gold in Lake Ontario.
HMCS Kingston and HMCS Glace Bay, 55-metre-long coastal defence vessels, cruised past Kingston on Tuesday and will focus their search in coming days in the waters off Prince Edward County.
The ships, outfitted with high-tech underwater scanning gear, a remote vehicle and the navy’s best divers, will launch an ambitious underwater expedition in search of nine jet fighter aircraft models believed to lie on the lakebed.
The models of the ill-fated Avro Arrow are important, given they’re virtually all that remains of the dream to dominate the skies with made-in-Canada jet fighter technology some say was ahead of its time in the 1950s.
The mission marks the first government-backed attempt to find the models, baby Arrows that historians and treasure hunters view as priceless gems awaiting restoration and display in museums across Canada.
Many private expeditions have failed to find the models, believed mired in the lake bottom since the 1950s.
The models, three metres long and two metres wide, were launched over the lake during the design and test phases.
Electronic data recorded from the models helped Arrow designers tweak elements of the plane’s radical design.
As the models screamed through the air at nearly twice the speed of sound, the data furnished military and aviation scientists with reliable data on the plane’s stability that helped in the creation of the full-sized aircraft handcrafted by more than 14,000 workers at A.V. Roe plant in Malton, Ont.
The plane turned heads around the world when its swept-wing design was launched into the skies over Ontario in 1957.
Less than two years after its rollout, then prime minister John Diefenbaker ordered 11 existing planes assembled in the Malton plant – five of which were airworthy – destroyed.
Should one or more intact models be recovered, it would be as close as anyone can come to resurrecting an Arrow.
The two warships are en route to a patch of search waters to be plumbed in early July using sonar devices that will sweep the featureless lake bottom for signs of the models.
Lt.-Cmdr. Scott Healey, commanding officer of HMCS Glace Bay and a Kingston native, said yesterday that Maritime Forces Atlantic is throwing all it can muster at the sunken treasures to identify and retrieve the items from the lakebed.
The ships will be assisted by the Trinity route survey office and the Canadian navy’s fleet diving unit from the Atlantic region.
“We do have all of the gear aboard we’ll need,” said Healey, in a cellphone interview with The Whig-Standard from aboard HMCS Glace Bay.
“We’re just waiting for some clarification on personnel issues.”
Following routine navigation and training exercises in the lake, including a Canada Day weekend visit to Kingston, Healey said both ships will embark on a systematic three-day sweep of waters where the mini Arrows are believed to have splashed down after being fired into the drink from a Canadian Forces launch pad at Point Petre in the southwest corner of Prince Edward County.
“We want to be on station for Monday [July 5],” Healey said. “We will have the side-scan ready first thing Monday morning.”
After conducting their sweep and registering possible targets below the lake surface, Healey said they’ll send in remote operating vehicles to investigate hits registered by the sonar.
The unmanned remote vehicle is called the Phantom and can plunge into very deep waters via expert manipulation from the surface. Live camera images will be relayed from the Phantom to monitors aboard the navy vessels.
“We’ll do Phantom diving in the lake the next day,” Healey said.
When the Arrow program was scrapped in 1959, workers were ordered to hack apart the existing jet fighters.
All things related to the Arrow were also ordered destroyed, including tool dies, design specifications, blueprints and castings.
The destructive reach of the Canadian government and military didn’t extend to the baby Arrows believed buried 70 metres deep in Lake Ontario.
Lou McPherson, 89, is a retired A.V. Roe welder who worked with the company for 27 years.
In an interview yesterday with The Whig, he remembered vividly from his Downsview home the disbelief of his fellow workers as he followed his orders and began cutting the planes to pieces with a welding torch almost 50 years ago.
He cut the nose of one plane completely off, an act that only days before the order would have seemed unthinkable.
“I hated the job of cutting them up but we were ordered to do it,” he said.
“The planes were cut to pieces and I never saved a single piece for a souvenir. We certainly had a good cutting time, shall we say.”
McPherson said he has never understood why a single plane wasn’t saved for posterity.
“Why they never saved one for a museum I’ll never know,” he said.
He said he’s glad to hear that the Canadian military was “finally coming to its senses to save at least something of the Arrow. It would be nice to find them [model Arrows], clean them and put them in a museum.They have a good museum in Trenton and its nearby. The RCAF Museum would be a good place for people to remember the Arrow.”
Not only is the RCAF Memorial Museum near the underwater location of the baby Arrows, it’s also on the grounds of CFB Trenton, the only runway where the Arrow landed away from Malton on one of its many test flights.
The interceptor was forced to an alternate landing because the runway at Malton was reportedly blocked thanks to a wheels-up crash of another aircraft.
The Arrow landed in Trenton on Feb. 2, 1959, only 18 days before the project was abandoned.
Jim Gartshore lives near the Trenton airbase on Highway 2.
He worked on the Orenda engines for the Arrow in Malton.
He told The Whig yesterday he still resents the Conservative government of the day for leaving such a sad legacy for Canadians to ponder.
Gartshore, 76, said he still has conversations with retired A.V. Roe friends and those retired from the Canadian Air Force, all of whom lament the loss of what they believe could’ve been the genesis of a major aircraft industry in Canada.
“Pretty well everyone I know is still very angry about it,” said Gartshore. “They just killed any chance we had at an aircraft industry here at home. No one ever explained to us why they did it. They just did it. I’ve washed my hands of it I’m so disgusted.”
Gartshore said he had mixed feelings at news of the government’s attempt to retrieve the Arrows.
“It’s about time. Finally, they’re going to start looking for these things,” said Gartshore. “I don’t know why they’ve waited so long.”
His son, Dave Gartshore, has grown up listening to the tales of the Arrow’s death and said he’s fascinated about the unwillingness of Canadians to forget the plane.
Dave Gartshore spent a great deal of time and money in a race with other private groups from Toronto and London, Ont., to find the first documented mini Arrow.
In 1999, he was reported to have found one of the Arrow models in deep water about seven kilometres off the southeast tip of Prince Edward County.
His video footage of the metal anomaly discovered on the lakebed by side-scan sonar was confirmed by so-called Arrow experts who compared the images to known blueprints of the models.
Last fall, Gartshore teamed with experts from the well-known shipwreck hunting television show The Sea Hunters and revisited the site of the anomaly.
What Gartshore believed was the first baby Arrow to be found, it’s now believed, was a Velvet Glove missile fired from the same Point Petre launch pad in the early 1950s by the Canadian military.
He welcomed the search by the Canadian navy to find baby Arrow artifacts that have remained so elusive for so many years.
The search, he speculated, may be now underway by the military because of pressure and publicity from private searchers such as himself.
“I’m very pleased the Canadian government is finally getting around to this,” he said. “All I’ve ever cared about is getting them up from the bottom before they disintegrate and are of no good to anyone. I just want these to be in museums for our younger generations to remember what happened so many years ago.”
Gartshore said he has made several pitches to the National Defence to find the Arrows and put them on display at RCAF Memorial Museum in Trenton.
The models are made of magnesium and titanium alloys, metals that can disintegrate if exposed to water for long periods of time, he said.
There were other special characteristics of the models, especially given the limited aeronautical science of the time, he said.
Every model was built to one-eighth scale, weighed about 225 kilograms (500 pounds) and contained two dozen sensors that transmitted critical data, such as air flow along all of the aircraft surfaces, back to scientists on land before the models crashed into the lake.
To shoot skyward, the models were piggybacked on missiles that generated about 45,000 pounds of thrust and propelled both model and missile to a velocity of up to 2,500 kilometres per hour.
When launched, the models were tracked using an FM telemetering system, cameras and radar.
In an interview from his Ottawa home last night, one of Canada’s leading Arrow experts and authors, Palmiro Campagna, said that data suggests the models could lay in waters eight kilometres to 40 kilometres from the launch pad.
“It’s akin to searching for a needle in a haystack,” said Campagna, whose latest of many books on the Arrow, Requiem for a Giant, A.V. Roe Canada and the Avro Arrow, was released in April.
He questioned whether the military will be able to find any of the models using side scan sonar because the technology records images in a sideways fashion. The arrow models may be buried and not easily detected by the sonar.
He suggested that the military might be better off to use what’s called a magnetometer, a device that is also towed behind the ship but has a greater discovery ability because it can detect metals even if they are buried in the sandy lake bottom.
Campagna said he was excited to learn that the military is finally investing time and energy to help find a vital piece of Canadian history feared lost forever.
“People think Diefenbaker put an end to the Arrow but it was the military that ordered everything to be destroyed,” he said. “We don’t know what the reason was to this day. Everything was destroyed except a few pieces we see in museums and the models, if they still exist in Lake Ontario.”
The irony of the military ramping up to search for the models wasn’t lost on Campagna.
After destroying the plane in its infancy, Campagna said “it is very ironic the military is trying to recapture lost history to undo the wrong.”
Even if the search is successful and every model is found in Lake Ontario, there will always remain some Arrow models that may never be found.
While nine were shot into Lake Ontario from 1954 to 1957 at the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment at Point Petre, two other were fired into the Atlantic Ocean from Wallops Island range in Virginia.
Those two models have never been found, Campagna said.