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That seems to be a pretty common lamentation when discussing the Arrow!
I meant your love, if not for the plane itself, than for it as a subject of controversy, and your amazement no one took the bait. After your implicit request for a response on that topic I started writing one but got sidetracked for days and days until your next post appeared.
But yes, it seems part of the general Arrow curse, doesn't it?
...ITTL, the Arrow is a good fighter, one of the best in the world in fact, but suffers from being a) expensive, and b) tricky to maintain (or what e of pi referred to as a “Ramp Queen par excellence”).
Missed that I guess--I didn't consider that it would be expensive as jet fighters of the era go. But of course twin engine tends to be pricier than single--being bigger, generally--and the more justification there is for believing it would have been superlative in one aspect or another, the more likely that supremacy came at a high price, no matter who made it. I rather naively assumed it would be cost-competitive and robust and easy to maintain, but I can see now those were silly assumptions for me to make.
The Iroquois engines, for instance, were made with a whole lot of titanium and other pricey, exotic and hard-to-machine metals--I suppose they could have used the properties of these materials to give it run-of-the-mill performance with very high reliability and being quite robust, but that's not what they were going for--they wanted performance to put other machines in the shade and thus these costly high-temperature, high-strength materials would be as relatively stretched to the breaking point as more mundane ones in ordinary engines would be--they'd break down as often as the established engines, if not more often, and have just one source in distant Canada for replacement parts, and their very properties desired the most would make them impossible for the mechanics of various Air Forces to improvise fixes in the hangars. A sweet deal for Avro if only they could have persuaded enough buyers to commit--and then if Avro overestimated their ability to follow through and put enough repair parts for the engines in the pipeline so the mechanics had enough ready to hand soon enough to keep to normal maintenance schedules, the engines would become a bottleneck and the super-planes would be mostly grounded--hangar queens as e of pi says--I believe a hangar queen properly refers to a craft cannibalized by the mechs to keep other planes operational.
But if Avro were prepared to deliver the parts promptly, and the customers prepared to pay (it would help if Avro marked up the parts only modestly, in proportion to their inherent cost due to their special materials and machining, and did not squeeze for all the market could temporarily bear--but doing that would be an attractive daydream for recouping the cost of the investment, which was I guess pretty massive) then I guess everyone would just figure the high price of keeping them all flying was the cost of excellence. That's what Avro and its Canadian boosters were hoping for.
But, worse than its absolute cost is that Avro was too small compared to such big players as North American, Republic, Convair, Martin, Boeing, McDonnell, Lockheed, overseas Dassault, or even the anemic revolving doors of the British big players being constantly reshuffled by the government in the 60s, in such a risky venture. The big players probably could have risked a gamble on such a scale and perhaps survived a shortfall lower than expectations and hopes--but note that Republic went under completely in the 1960s and NAA and Convair went through major restructuring transforming them to Rockwell and General Dynamics, respectively, and of course over the decades to follow the survivors all got merged in a game of corporate musical chairs until now I can't quite tell if there are three of them left, or just two in the USA.
Avro Canada was just plain out of their league and nothing short of the Canadian government nationalizing them and raising taxes significantly to subsidize them, then playing diplomatic hardball to level the field between them and the Yankee firms could possibly have sustained them in such a brutal marketplace. They weren't out of their league technically as they proved, but they didn't stand a chance as a competitive firm in that market. Their only alternative to becoming the implement of an unaccountably fanatical government would be to become the appendage of some patron big firm overseas--most likely a US one, possibly French or British--but then their unique national vision would probably be smothered in "Not Invented Here" syndrome.
Poor Avro C! Poor Arrow! The more doomed I convince myself it must have been, the more I love it. That's my pathology of course--I tend to love that which is doomed or already dead--hence my championing of the Soviet cause, for instance.
Or spaceplanes.
When I first started looking into this (at the suggestion of a certain Canadian of my acquaintance...) I was struck by just how much of the weight of argument was against Arrow continuing - the huge development cost, the perception it was obsolete in the missile age...
It is, to remind anyone who may have forgotten this bit of family background of mine, speaking as an Air Defense Command interceptor pilot that my father so eulogizes the F-106, his personal favorite (he has also flown the F-105 in combat, and the F-16 after the Delta Dart was retired, and some other planes too). And yet, Convair's Delta fighters were a 1950s design, and its planned successors (that the higher-performance upgrades of the Arrow would have been trying to compete with) such as the F-108 were all axed, despite being Yankee products from the big boys. Actually the plane my Dad says ADCOM wanted and expected to get to replace the 106 was the fighter version of the famous Lockheed Blackbird, the F-12. "We'll take the F-12 or nothing!" thundered the ADCOM commander, says my Dad. And they got--the latter. ADCOM itself was abolished, folded into the Tactical Air Command, in the early 1980s, and its doom was sealed in those heady early '60s days, by that very same argument of obsolescence of the whole mission of continental defense by interceptors. It's not just a rhetorical trick to use against Canadian manufacturers--Dad's entire career track went down with it.
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I think you’re right that future developments will show Arrow to be a versatile, effective aircraft as time goes on and memories of the costs begin to fade. And she is a damned pretty plane!
Well, now, as you pointed out, someone now has to supply the repair parts.
I suppose when Avro Canada gets restructured out of existence, some big firm, probably a British one associated with the Hawker group, or maybe Rolls Royce, gets the rights to the Iroquois engine and the responsibility of making those replacement parts, under contract to the Germans and the Canadian government. Maybe they'd even do some of the hoped-for upgrades, and I certainly suppose there are lessons it can teach whoever gloms onto it, NIH Syndrome or no. I guess the other airframe parts similarly get spun off to some related British firm.
The costs won't entirely fade from memory as long as those expensive parts still need to be purchased to keep the old planes flying. If they are going to survive they have to prove they are worth the cost; very gradually they won't be able to keep up with newer planes--though it helps that after the 60s, the development cycle of new types slowed down a whole lot, so that we've only had a couple of newer generations since. Actually the "generation" of the planes that are still pending or just recently adopted today stretches back to the late 80s!
So if they can take the cumulative wear (with replacement parts, which would be getting gradually cheaper as the state of the art catches up to them) they might stay in first-line service in Canada and Germany into the 1980s, and then become desirable commodities for second-string air forces that buy old proven models, and serve on with them well into the 90s. The "Canuck" proved quite durable after all.
...IOTL, Brezhnev was able to use this position to ensure the Party gets the upper hand on the Government.
As I understand it, the Soviet system was entirely one where the Party was supreme, full stop. In OTL reality, every person ever perceived as the main leader of the USSR was also leader of the Party--in rare cases where someone like Stalin may have let someone else hold the formal office it was well understood that he was the man who counted--not despite the Party, but leading it in fact. Brezhnev did not enhance this supremacy, he merely was organically part of it--a Party man first, whatever else he was, second.
Failure to keep the Party supreme would lead straight to a crisis of legitimacy of the regime and its certain collapse if that lapse were not rectified in very short order. The supremacy of the Communist Party was built in and had a lot of inertia supporting it, so for such a crisis to be reached, either the whole system had eroded to such a point the thing was about to collapse anyway, or someone would have to make a very determined effort to erode Party legitimacy, and that someone would have a lot of enemies determined to bring him down, quickly. He'd need to do an impressive job of building up some other power center, and mobilizing it. I don't see how it could happen at all.
(Interestingly, as I understand it this is the opposite of Gorbachev’s approach IOTL, when he made himself President and increased the power of the Government in order to by-pass obstructionists in the Party, culminating in multi-party elections and the effective irrelevance of the Communist Party.)
A case in point--and note that was his penultimate move. First he got to the position where he thought he could reform the USSR to bypass the Party by rising within it, to its supreme head--and he was able to get there because the whole system was indeed in extreme crisis, and his bold notions of how to reform the Party as well as the extra-Party Soviet Union held out hope to decisive numbers in diverse factions. Then, when he did give up on moving the Party as a cohesive whole to where he wanted it, in the direction he thought it must head, and as you say bypassed it effectively--he rendered not only the Communist Party but the entire Soviet Union irrelevant. Having undercut the structure he climbed to power in, its collapse took him down with it, and the entire structure he thought would be the alternative to the old Party system with all its corruptions vanished into a Utopian mist as well.
I don't blame Gorbachev for destroying the USSR, or even for failing to save it--it was terminally ill by the time he arrived on the scene. But I do think he misunderstood the basis of what power he had.
As mentioned in the Post, officially the coup has established collective leadership, so Shelepin is constrained to act with the agreement of his comrades. Then again, comrades can be changed...
I've heard a little bit about Shelepin before; I think the reason I never heard more is that he is a little figure, a Shemp. And he's thinking magically about the Party Chairmanship; no one other than Lenin, Stalin, or Khrushchev ever held it before him ITTL. The difference is, those men rose organically within the Party and were accorded the leading position in part because of their political coalition-building, but also in large part because of their strong vision of the future of Bolshevism and deep commitment to it beyond it being a mere career and meal ticket--others could hold very important offices but it meant something to speak for the Party as a whole, a matter of vision, not just having a bunch of powerful cronies.
I don't see Shelepin as having the strength to rule as a Stalin, nor the sort of commitment to Bolshevism he had. Of course Stalin's notion of Bolshevism included the idea that it was imperative he head the movement himself and not someone else.
But he believed in it, I think. I'm not saying Shelepin didn't believe in Communism, but that he didn't have the kind of deep thoughts about it and commanding vision to convince others that he represented the current incarnation of the proper and historically necessary direction Communism would move in.
Brezhnev, for all his gray mediocrity, did have that, insofar as he led, OTL, a movement toward collegial stability and staying a steady course of incremental progress. His "era" lived by that and died by that, and he incarnated the mentality. Despite his own deplorable tendency to self-aggrandizement he never ceased to be collegial, to consult with the dispersed powers of the highest level of the Party and listen to their views--one might say had he not taken his cue from others he'd have had no views of his own to implement--but that was exactly why his colleagues could agree to leave him in the top seat.
Shelepin would probably try to be, in very small form, what Lavrenti Beria might have tried for had he seized supreme power after Stalin's death. Beria did not believe in the necessity of the Party and proposed to simply fold all leadership into the Soviet government; he also is said, I'm not sure how reliably, to have favored reforming the Soviet economy along more capitalist lines. This is why I doubt very much that despite his great power of terror (another reason people would want to be rid of him!) that he could prevail more than a handful of days once his patron Stalin was dead--he was not suited to run the Soviet system as it had evolved under Stalin, which very much depended on maintaining the Party as a distinct and supreme entity, and keeping a strong distinction between Western and Soviet practices--trying to reform it the way Beria wanted, even if Beria had been a saint and not the rather monstrous figure he was, would lead instantly to civil war.
Now I don't suspect Shelepin the Shemp of having these particular notions; I doubt he wanted to abolish the Party or weaken it in any way nor Westernize Soviet economics. But I do think his attempt to rule through the Party would fail due to being tone-deaf to the iconic and mythic aspects of what Party supreme leadership entails; he would fall back on expedients that undercut the legitimacy and independence of the Party and would, if carried out, subordinate it to the state--thus undercutting the very foundation of all Soviet legitimacy.
Before allowing this to happen, his colleagues would turn on him, and either effectively expel him from the inner circle of leadership completely (conceivably even executing him as an enemy of the people) or else sit on him until he understood that having made the misstep of moving into the Party Chairmanship, there he could only be a stuffed figurehead on a very short chain; to stay in that ceremonial position he had better study the lines fed to him and repeat them very convincingly. In effect in that case the real party chairmanship would be displaced away from the ostensible one.
That would be a disturbing development in the Soviet system--assuming TTL has no brilliant nor ASB save for the USSR and it goes down much as per OTL within a couple decades, this charade would probably be considered a major event in the retrospective narrative of its collapse. Failure of the system to turn up some individual who was the right mix of charisma and fit with the current groupthink of the Party leadership would ramify in failure to speak convincingly to the Soviet masses; the moment the material progress for those masses that characterized the late 60s and early 70s of OTL faltered, the legitimacy of the Soviet system would be called deeply into question.
Shelepin like Icarus has flown too close to the sun and the wax on his wings is melting; he can't go back. He should have stuck with being KGB head and worked from that position, or perhaps gone for the top Soviet governmental position--either would involve picking someone else to be nominally the leader and following them. He can't run the Party like Stalin, he has no vision for an alternative future direction he can inspire, he can't be a gladhanding regular guy who's pals with everyone who matters like Brezhnev. Top puppet is the best he can hope for now, and that will mean the real power of the upcoming decades in the Kremlin will be obscure and perhaps fragmented.
Well, someone who knows a lot more about him than I do might come up with unsuspected dimensions that can explain how he can keep his position for real. If he does, from what we do know about him, I guess the subsequent decade or two will be more deeply Stalinist than even Brezhnev would have liked.