For English Canada, the destruction of those 
     planes was a trauma that lasts to this day because 
     the Arrow represented the height of national pride, 
     and their destruction the deepest low.

An underdog nation, with pride in "punching above its weight class", placed a lot of hope and pride in a single piece of military hardware.

It was the largest battleship ever built, key to the Japanese strategy in WWII. American battleships' guns and armor were limited by the need for American battleships to fit through the Panama Canal. Knowing this, Japan built the much larger Yamato class with armor impervious to the 16" guns on American battleships. Her 18" guns could cut through any American battleship with ease. The Yamato was really a marvel.

Of course, it was utterly useless in battle against the American navy. Its WWI-era fire control systems were decades behind those of American battleships, especially the Iowa class, and of course more importantly WWII showed the world that battleships were helpless against naval air superiority. The Yamato was sunk by American planes, having never fired a shot against an opposing battleship.

The Yamato has remained in Japanese imagination, though, most notably in the long-running anime Uchu Senkan Yamato / Space Battleship Yamato / "Star Blazers".

I would say that causality is backwards. Radar existed in the 1930s but was never seriously developed. But imagine a world where it had been and that battleships had radar-directed AA guns, perfectly do-able in the 1940s. It would very early on in WW2 have been "proven" that aircraft couldn't touch a battleship at sea and so noone would have bothered to invent carriers. Air superiority became a thing because battleships were helpless against it, not the other way round.

Carriers were invented well before this. And would have been invented regardless, as they were useful for more than just sinking battleships. The fact that they could sink battleships resulted in them becoming the preeminent surface combatant.

But carriers were useful for scouting, for land attack, for defense against enemy aircraft, for anti-submarine warfare, for killing smaller surface combatants (like destroyers).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1jsrOqlGSk

Followed by using the barely understood jump drive, resulting in SDF-1, two nearby aircraft carriers and the entire island being transported behind the orbit of Pluto. :D

I also really liked the part where a couple of the main characters got stranded in an isolated part of the humongous ship right after the jump & had to fish for a frozen tuna floating in front of airlock to get some food while waiting to be rescued. :)

It was useless with the overly-complicated battle plans and bad luck of the IJN. (Yamamoto dictated such complex maneuvers that the captains lost track of the objective at both Midway and Leyte Gulf.)

Had the Yamato and Musashi not been distracted and just turned into Leyte Gulf as planned, the American landing craft were sitting ducks. Instead, the Yamato went home, and the Musashi was swarmed and sunk.

That's overstating it a bit.

Six battleships, seven cruisers, and 21 destroyers were prepared to meet the Japanese force, and they'd have been under air attack either way.

It's arguably worst. The Avro was a cool paper project (it is ultimately unknown if it could even achieve the projected performance since no flights were performed anywhere close to the claimed speeds), while the A220 was a complete airliner project with a production line. The Avro didn't serve any purpose, it was rendered obsolete by ICBMs and 50's soviet technology, while the A220 has $52 billion dollars worth of orders as of 2020.

While there was very little the Canadian government could do to save the Arrow, other than maybe building it as a training aircraft, it was 100% possible for the Government to save Bombardier and the A220 program. Of course, the company being headquartered in Quebec made it politically impossible.

Yes, totally. Delta alone had ordered 75 CS100's [1] and were deeply involved in the tariff dispute as a result. It's a unique plane -- in size class, in passenger comfort and in fuel economy. Airlines realized that and were buying it up like hotcakes. Neither Airbus nor Boeing had competitive aircraft, and neither really did Embraer. It's closer to the Sukhoi SuperJet and some of the Comacs, but reliable [2], and domestic.

The only reason Airbus got it was they offered up their Mobile, Alabama assembly plant as a way of skirting the tariffs that never materialized.

> The program was clearly in trouble when Airbus took over, which may have discouraged airlines from taking a chance on a great aircraft, but whose manufacturer ran the risk of running out of money to keep the program going.

The program wasn't itself in any trouble except for the later-ruled-illegal tariffs the US tried to impose at Boeing's request.

[1] https://news.delta.com/tags/bombardier-cs100

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-18/mexico-s-...

Of course not! But that's not seeing the bigger picture: It's always safe to buy from Boeing/Airbus because you know that these two companies are backed by their respective governments. Same thing goes for Embraer.

Google "bombardier bailout"

The US ended up backing off the tariffs because they were garbage and totally unfounded.

No further bailouts were needed. And in fact, in Canada, only Bombardier really lost. Investissement Québec retains a 25% stake in the A220 [1].

Globally, Boeing ended up the biggest loser for their inane meddling, as they don't have an aircraft that competes with the A220 -- and they gave one to Airbus free of charge. They then tried to cover their bumbling by trying to buy the regional jet arm of Embraer -- which fell through due to the COVID crisis.

Losers: Bombardier, Boeing.

Winners: Airbus, Investissment Quebec.

[1] https://www.investquebec.com/international/en/press-releases...

Canada will be left out as a sub-contractor. It has about 650 total orders, and Airbus estimates 6'000 planes throughout the plane's 20 years lifecycle. All that because the federal government simply wouldn't intervene.

And anyway, Bombardier was doing some operations outside Canada, like the wing in Northern Ireland.

I'm afraid it might stop being the case.

The aerospace sector has a long history of getting subsidized through either government help or military contracts. That's been true for Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, Embraer. It's a strategic choice and investment that the Canadian government simply wasn't willing to make.

It was too large for regionals, too small for mainline. For example many airline union scoping contracts require planes with more than 70 or 100 pax go to mainline which means it will cost more to operate. Airlines don't want to do that. If it's going mainline, they want more seats (think 737/a320 ranges) which the A220 doesn't have.

There's a somewhat famous post from a Bombardier product manager on the internet detailing the history of the aircrafts evolution that played out like the Bradley Fighting Vehicle in The Pentagon Wars. Despite marketing data and customer feedback saying don't build this they kept pushing ahead and the Quebec tax payer footing some of that bill.

These aren't significant outside of the US market. And okay, the US market is a significant market for aircraft, but by way of comparison most of the major orders of the larger E-Jets have been non-US airlines.

The A220 has a very big order book for an aircraft of its size.

If they weren't qualified the industry wouldn't have been poached. Rather, this suggests that at least at some point they were significantly more qualified than those in the US.

[1]https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/city-of-vancouver-criti...

Fairchild Semiconductor fathered a thousand companies. How many did BlackBerry?

Don’t rely on a committee of bureaucrats shuffling tax money to their idea of the best companies (The ones that their brother works at or the ones that best wine and fined them).

Take the money from those government schmoes and use it to cut taxes on and barriers to investment. Make it easier for entrepreneurs to stay and build, and to raise money.

Buy your weapons in the open market, and save.

See e.g. https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ for a nice overview.

There is a lot of randomness and counter factuals to be considered in these stories.

They absolutely would not still be flown today.

The Arrow was a relic of the pre-ICBM cold war. When the USSR was expected to field fleets of nuclear bombers over the north pole. The Arrow was designed to go fast, launch an unguided nuclear air to air rocket, turn around and fly home. It was great at this, but in the ensuing years, the Soviet Union put a lot more effort into its ICBM capability than its intercontinental nuclear bomber capability. It would have had difficulty adapting to other roles. As a delta wing, its energy management was likely terrible. Its thin, delicate wings would be ill suited to hanging a heavy bomb load from.

It is comparable (though slightly worse) in era, role, configuration, and performance to the F-106, which was retired in the '80s. The Arrow was designed to do something that was simply unnecessary.

If the program had been completed, it still would have been replaced in the '70s or '80s. The only difference is that it would have likely been replaced by an Avro Canada designed aircraft rather than an American one.

The first was the A300, and at that point the number was supposed to mean the passenger number, though as it turned out there wasn't much demand for a 300 passenger wide body at the time and it was scaled down. After that, the numbers became more or less random.