دانلود کتاب Shutting Down the National Dream: A. V. Roe and the Tragedy of the Avro Arrow

A love story of a nation, a plane, and a dream . . . In fourteen short, precocious years, from 1946 to 1959, A. V. Roe Canada and its two subsidiaries, Avro Aircraft and Orenda Engines, almost single-handedly set the aviation world on its ear. Their designers and engineers were described by NATO's General Norstad as "just about the best team anywhere."

By 1958 Avro had designed, and was about to produce, the most sophisticated piece of aviation design and technology the world had ever seen: the Arrow, decades in advance of world competition. Truly, they had redefined the national dream.

On February 20, 1959, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, more at home with the cost of prairie grain than the cost of hi-tech aircraft, cancelled the Arrow and, to ensure the annihilation, ordered the immediate scrapping of the six existing planes. (Mysteriously, one of the &ircraft may have escaped the cutters' torches, giving rise to the notion of a "Phantom Arrow.")

Many argue that, upon the Arrow's demise, Canada lost its position as a worldclass hi-tech power. The aeronautical brain drain to the U.S. began; many of Canada's best aviation people became involved in U.S. space programs and- were instrumental in putting Americans on the moon. On the thirtieth anniversary of the Arrow's first flight, legendary test pilot Jan Zurakowski reflected sadly on the Arrow's cancellation: - "It's almost as if our spirit as a nation died."

Greig Stewart has told the story behind the story of A. V. Roe and the fabled Arrow. A story of the right stuff at the wrong time. A tragedy of government errors. A love story of a nation, a plane, and a dream.