I’m not going into this thing. There was a great film about the Arrow, and I especially remember when the plant workers were all laid off with out prior warning and just told to go home, there was a swarm of recruiters from every single American aerospace company handing out business cards on the spot.
So, that doesn't mean they went on to design everything south of the border after the "Deif" shut the Arrow down.
Actually the Canadians were the ones to first start really working with titanium, and it was exactly what made the Arrow so special. It was the first aircraft that extensively used titanium.
Not according to the men who built the SR-71. The Skunk Works had to learn almost from scratch how to fabricate most of the titanium parts that went into the SR-71. No plane at the time used it as extensively, because no plane operated at the speeds, altitudes and temperatures the SR-71 did. This also went for the fuel which had such a high ignition point you could drop a match in it and it wouldn't light, or the oil which had to work across a huge temperature range or even the tires which were made from an aluminium compound so they would burst from the heat.
Hold on there, I seem to remember Astra radar/FCS, and a very ambitious Sparrow II program which US Navy chose not to tackle.
It was the massive cost overruns on the weapons system that killed the Arrow, it was costing almost twice as much as the aircraft itself.
There was a problem with radar return “ghosting” though, and I seem to remember that Bears were able to ghost their returns in a radius of 300 kilometers.
It had no problem shooting down the QB-47 drones in tests at all altitudes and ranges.
In any case, why the mystery? If sustained Mach3 80 mile intercepts was the name of the game, what happen? Tomcat?
Part of the problem was the classified nature of the program, not many people knew about the capabilities of the SR-71 in the early 1960s. Another was politics, the SR-71 helped kill the B-70 program which people like Curtis Lemay were backing. They weren't inclined to give business to Johnson after that. And a Mach 3+ interceptor was just to revolutionary for some, same with the bomber.
What does that have to do with anything?
104 is a completely different bowl of soup, and on that note MiG-21 kind of took the 104 out of the game from the start. A far as I recall the first recorded supersonic air combat took place between the Pakistani 104 and Indian 21, which resulted in a victory for the 21.
You were claiming that the Arrow team formed before the Skunk Works. In fact they both have their roots in WW II. You also made the claim that the Arrow team did most of the foundation work for supersonic design which is nonsense. Bell designed the first aircraft to go into controlled supersonic flight, the X-1 and as I pointed out, the F-104 was the first Mach 2 fighter designed and built by Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works.
The MiG-21 appeared a few years later and was the contemporary of the F-4. In 1954 when it first flew the F-104 was the hottest thing in the sky.
[edit on 14-1-2008 by what-lies-beneith]
[edit on 14-1-2008 by what-lies-beneith]
