One of my favorite personal stories also happens to be one of my closest encounters with flying saucers and with some pretty significant Canadian heritage. The story begins about 25 years ago (around 1987) on a NordAir 737 flight somewhere over Lake Huron on a trip from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie where we were living at the time. I guess NordAir is a bit of Canadian heritage on its own. It was a mid-sized regional carrier that my wife Loreen used to work for that was later acquired by Canadian Airlines and that was eventually acquired by Air Canada. Anyway, with Loreen working at NordAir, we had no cost flights and I was returning from a golf weekend from Toronto on such a flight as this story took shape. As we got settled in, I found myself seated beside a pleasant middle-aged woman we'll call Wilma (only because I've forgotten her actual name), who was eager to chat. I usually prefer a quiet flight with a rare chance to read a book but I was later thrilled that she struck up a conversation. It seemed that Wilma was also on a weekend getaway but hers was with her sister who lived somewhere in the Southern Ontario area. Wilma and her sister had had a nice weekend of catching up, doing some shopping and enjoying some meals out and, she said, some nice wines as well. I guess if you interchange the golfing for the shopping, our respective weekend getaways weren't that different.

Anyway, as the topics flew by, I discovered that Wilma's husband was retired. I was working then as a process engineer for Algoma Steel and I mistakenly made the assumption that everyone in the Sault worked for the steel plant and thought I might recognize his name or at least the names of some people we may have worked with in common. However, when I inquired, Wilma said "Oh no; my husband didn't work for Algoma Steel, he made flying saucers."  I suddenly reassessed my situation; I wasn't sitting beside some pleasant middle-aged woman, I was sitting beside a whack-job that just might take this plane down in some deranged effort to reunite us with the mother ship. Regardless, she seemed to pose no immediate threat and we had another 40 minutes to go so I thought I would take the bait and tread a little further. With that I uttered one of the more peculiar, yet totally serious, questions that I have asked in my life; "Oh I see; and what kind of flying saucers did your husband build?" Wilma said "They were regular kind, the round ones shaped like a saucer with a cockpit and a glass bubble over top." Okay so that was fruitless; I needed to figure a more direct way to expose the insanity. My next question was the one that landed me, only a little indirectly, in the middle of one of the most fascinating Canadian heritage stories of our time. I asked Wilma, with whom her husband had made these "regular" flying saucers. Her response floored me, even at 30,000 feet and 700 kilometers per hour. She said "He made them for Avro, the same company that made the Avro Arrow.” I was immediately hooked and of course, Wilma knew this; she had no doubt told this story many times before and was waiting for the dumbfounded reaction that was now plastered across my face. Enthusiasts and historians would know (but I didn't at the time) that in addition to the Arrow, Avro had also been working on prototypes for vertical take-off aircraft called the Avrocar.  The picture here shows one of the first flights of the Avro VZ-9 Avrocar in November, 1959.

The saucer was able to hover around a meter off the ground but became very unstable at elevations higher than that. Eventually, both the craft and the plan became unstable and efforts to create a production version were cancelled.

But enough about the failed flying saucer; here I was sitting next to someone directly connected to the Arrow project. As a mechanical engineer, I was fascinated to hear more of this fantastic, if not tragic, Canadian aerospace story. As many readers will know, Avro built the CF-105 Arrow which was an engineering and aerospace achievement of enormous proportions. It was theoretically capable of achieving speeds of up to 3 times the speed of sound (Mach 3) and of flying at altitudes of up to 60,000 feet. The plane was targeted to become the primary interceptor aircraft for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) targeted for the 1960s and beyond. Unfortunately, for reasons that largely remain a mystery and a political debate, the program was cancelled under the Diefenbaker government in February 1959 only months after its first successful test flight in March of 1958. 

But, most of this I knew, and nowadays, any of us could gather this much information with a couple of clicks on a smart-phone to settle a heated dinner conversation. I was interested in the inside scoop;  what had Wilma’s husband known… what were the stories that she could tell? So I asked her these questions.  Of course, the program, and especially, its cancellation, was veiled in secrecy. What she did know, is that one afternoon, her husband and all of the Avro employees, except the most senior management, were sent home. The rumor mill was going crazy as to what was going on. Had a CF-105 crashed? Were their planned attacks on the manufacturing facility from a cold-war nation? Finally, she said, there were calls from management to some of the senior workers to come back to work. They were told what the task was and some refused to return. Wilma and her husband needed the money at the time and he wanted to be part of whatever was happening inside the gates. The next day, he and some of his willing co-workers, assembled back at the plant and had the unenviable task of destroying the most advanced delta wing supersonic aircrafts of the time. It has become all but accepted that the Arrow was at least competitive, if not superior, to anything the US or the Soviets had at the time. Wilma told me that the demolition crew, armed with torches and metal saws took to destroying all 5 of the completed Arrow as well as all the others that were in various stages of production.  She said that her husband and his co-workers, some of the most proud and skilled craftsmen and engineers, “were crying like babies” as they completed this heart-wrenching technological execution. Wilma and I also shared a few tears as she told me her fascinating story. Around that time, we were preparing to land in Sault Ste. Marie. I may or may not have gotten Wilma’s contact information, I don’t remember now; but I do remember the story well and I do remember imagining how her poor husband and his coworkers must have felt.  All I know is that I never did reconnect with Wilma or her husband but it does remain my most interesting flight, as least as far as conversations go. 

For more on the Avro Arrow, and on the legend that Air Marshal W.A. Curtis, who headed Avro, defied Diefenbaker and flew one of the Arrows away to a secret location where it still hides today, you can view the Wikipedia post at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_CF-105_Arrow. So this story remains my closest encounter with a flying saucer and my closest encounter with one of the most sensational aerospace stories in Canadian history.

P.S. For real enthusiasts, you can visit this full scale Avro Arrow in the Canadian Air and Space Museum, located at the former CFB Downsview, built by volunteers with assistance from local aerospace firms.