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Pee ne ee Childhood memories help spark book Author Greig Stewart's childhood in the Toronto neighborhood worked at airplane used to fly over memories of the Avro Ar- district of Weston. Avro," he recalls. Pro- the school he attended. row go back to his "Mostoftheguysinthe totypes of the versatile Still, not a teenager at WENDRICKS Furniture Warehouse oe et, Psy Up to 50 upholstery fabrics to choose from idk rom FREE layaway up to 12 months FREE delivery within 70 miles radius NO.INTEREST TERMS STARTER PACKAGES From $2,29500 GOOD QUALITY AND VALUE FOR YOUR MONEY "89 Product at '88 Prices WeNATiCKS Warehouse annie 720-1022 Furniture | 461 Dunlop St. West ORDER NOW -- A SMALL DEPOSIT GUARANTEES YOUR DELIVERY DATE At Jerry's all Zenith Colour TV's come with a No Charge .3 yr. warranty Drop into Jerry's for more details 21" Model SE2033Y with Remote Control SC3800 and MTS Stereo Sound Stunningly designed and simply beautiful to look at. 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OF BARRIE LTD. 342 BAYFIELD ST., BARRIE 720-0551 ml Hours: Open Daily 9-6 Thursday & Friday 9-9 the end of the 1950s, he remembers the excite- ment as the word began to spread that the Arrow. was exceeding all expec- tations -- Canada's first bold essay into Mach2 engineering was proving to be a triumph, the air- frame and the Iroquois engines were at the cut- ting edge of new technology. Canada stood on the brink of leadership into a high tech future. But, most of all he remembers the Friday afternoon when the Ar- row project was "'killed'"' and 14,548 workers were laid off. Stewart's father, an emigrant from Glasgow and a strong union man, _ helped mobilize the tight knit neighborhoods, collec- ting money to ease the financial calamity for the laid off. Greig Stewart now lives on County Road 29 in Crossland, just outside Elmvale. His interest in the Ar- row, the background to the decision to kill it and the implications it had for Canadian industry, has never changed. "I always waited," he said, 'for the book to come out." It never did so Stewart decided to write it himself. It wasn't what you could call a quick decision: as a graduate student at York Universi- ty 13 years ago, he chose the Arrow affair as the subject for an MA disser- tation in_ political economy. That was when,. with the en- % couragement of Jim Lax- er, who is now a pro- fessor at York, he did the bulk of the which forms the basis of "Shutting Down the Na- tional Dream'"' published last December. . Three years later, with his thesis gathering dust, Stewart was hired by the { CBC to help produce a program on the Arrow shut down, 20 years before. That took him across Canada as well as to Europe and the United States to interview some of the principals in the Arrow design team. Men such as Fred Smye, former president of Avro who was living in Portugal and Jim Floyd, the designer of the Arrow and the C-102 Jetliner the world's second and North America's first jet propelled passenger plane. When Stewart inter- viewed him Floyd, one of the titans of modern air- craft design, was working on the Concorde. Now Floyd is back in Canada, retired in Islington. He was one of many of the 150 people Stewart had interviewed whose en- quiries, '"'when are you going to finish it?' final- ly drove him to complete the book. The author's sympathy for the Arrow team is un- disguised "Most of them are still alive,' he says. "I finished it because of them." In the process Stewart disposed of a lot of the "mythology surrounding the story." He believes the decision to cancel the project was inevitable. "If the Liberals had been re-elected," he says, "they would have cancell- ed it."' Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, long regard- ed as the villain of the piece, was simply ig- norant of the importance of the project which in- volved, besides Avro itself, 650 Canadian suppliers. Three years after the first Sputnik, armchair tacticians decided the day of the fighter plane was over and the future belonged to guided missiles. That was the view of some cabinet ministers, early subscribers to the myth that the Arrow's range was so limited that it would crash, its fuel tanks dry, after intercep- ting an "enemy" aircraft. In fact, Stewart points out, technically the Ar- row passed every test it faced, and some: at three- quarter throttle, with engines inferior to the Iroquois power plant, whose development was one of the central achievements of the Ar- row project, it achieved 1.8 Mach, compared with the 1.5 Mach the CF-18 Canada's latest, U.S.- built, fighter reaches. research #7 It soared to 75,000 feet, the CF-18 gets up to 50-60,000 feet. According to test pilot Jan Zurakowski, who wrote the introduction to Stewart's book, the Ar- row's performance, 30 years ago, compares with the ultra modern Mig-28. Stewart sees the Arrow decision as a turning point in the development of the Canadian economy. 'It would have established a very high tech base in Canada. The design team was inven- ting as it went along. They solved problems as they arose."' The Avro team was "'on a roll." Nothing they attempted seemed to go wrong. Years of building planes under license from foreign manufacturers had done nothing to dampen Avro and it final- ly got the go-ahead to build an all-Canadian product. ' And, says Stewart "the company did a very dar- ing thing. It went straight into production. We couldn't develop our own rifle or tank," he recalls wryly, but the Arrow and the Iroquois engines were a magnificent success. Greig Stewart That success, he sug- gests, may have had something to do with the timing of the govern- ment's decision to close it down. The sixth Arrow pro- totype was "within two weeks of taxiing trials' Jim Floyd told him. "'Tt would have been even more embarassing if the first Arrow to be fitted with Iroquois engines had been breaking speed records." Avro itself must accept part of the blame for the shutdown, Stewart feels, because the company had become a monster which "would have collapsed under the weight of its own folly." Arrogant and partisan though it was, however, Stewart has nothing but praise for its enlightened social and labor policies, it fought discrimination against minorities, employed the handicap- ped and morale, as evidenced by low absenteeism, was good. The company decision to lay everyone off on the day of the decision was, says Stewart, an indica- tion not of its labor rela- tions record but of its determination to cause Diefenbaker, with whom company president Crawford Gordon had a famous feud, the max- imum amount of embarassment. To the employees, the move was shattering, because on the brink of success they were reduc- ed to unemployment. A generation later they still regret missing the chance to produce what they are convinced was a world beater. The, book has been a publishing success story and the publicity shy Ministry of Recreation and Tourism employee from Flos Township -- "I work hard to keep my name out of the papers" -- has become a regular on talk shows and interview programs. Bookstores have already sold two printings of the book, about 12,000 copies, at $25.95. It took Stewart 18 months "on weekends" to complete the final draft of his book. He has "'one or two ideas" about his next project but would like to see "Shutting Down the National Dream" turned into a movie. Wednesday, March 1, 1989, Page 7