Canada goose.

A couple of good flying stories coming out in the Canadian press the last few days worthy of snarling at. First, it's the 100th anniversary of the first airplane flight in Canada. Now I ran a few posts a while back that had more than a few planes flying before the Wright Brothers, so no doubt, if you give me a bit I'll find something that pre-dates the Silver Dart's first flight, not just for Canada, but the whole damn empire.

How Canadian can you get? Christ, they flew the thing from a frozen lake, Lac Bras d'Or (the name of a very fine beer too). The machine was designed and built by the Aerial Experiment Association, a committee (how Canadian is that?). The thing was actually built in the states and flown a couple of times in early 1909 before being dragged to the frozen lake for a few circuits around the pond. The projects patriarch, Alexander Graham Bell had his summer home at this lake, which no doubt was much more pleasant in the summer.

At the other end of the spectrum, and no less Canadian, and for some dumb ass reason shares roughly the same anniversary, is the death of the Avro Arrow. Built by the A.V. Roe aircraft company of Malton, Ontario. The company was originally the Victory Aircraft company, and was bought out by Hawker Siddeley of Britain in 1950.

Their first jet was the Avro Jetliner, and it was their last. There were no problems with it, in fact it hauled goods for years. But they wanted to build real sexy stuff like fighter jets cause all those damn commies were just over the horizon. The silly jet liner set all sorts of records for the time and was not prone to falling apart like other early ones.

Turning instead to military stuff, Avro began to design the Arrow, the CF-105. The first flight was March 25, 1958. It could beat pretty much anything going at the time. So, it was scrapped February 20, 1959.

Politicians at the time could not bear the price tag of over a billion dollars and scrapped the project. When I say scrapped, I mean it. The whole inventory of 7 machines cut up and mulched. C'mon. The argument that they were worried that the bad guys would steal the technology doesn't hold water. The damn thing was almost 80 feet long. Couldn't they just take the spark plugs out?