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The Avro Canada Archives
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Avro
Canada's Flying Saucer:
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The VZ-9V Avrocar Flying Disc
The
UFO FILES
Palmiro
Campagna has woven together eyewitness accounts and secret government files,
including newly declassified documents. Campagna relates some startling
episodes in Canadian UFO history, from revelations made to Wilbert Smith,
a Canadian Ministry of Transport engineer in Washington, D.C., to the United
States' so-called "black" program, which may have originated with the Avrocar
(also known as Project Silver Bug), the United States air Force flying
saucer built in Canada, to the unexplained case of Stefan Michalak, whose
close encounter with a strange, burning hot craft left him physically scarred!
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In June 1954 Avro Canada
produced a report entitled "Project Y2: Flat Vertical Take-Off Supersonic
Gyroplane". The report described a circular craft using conventional engines
for power, with a cockpit in the center of the craft. Intakes for forward
flight were located at the top and bottom of the craft, forward of the
cockpit. For vertical takeoff, intakes were located in an inner ring on
the upper surface. Exhausts were located on the perimeter of the craft.
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During takeoff, air
would flow through slots in the upper surface of the disk to radially mounted
engines which would eject their exhaust to the periphery
of the craft. At this point the exhaust would be deflected downwards by
a series of vanes or flaps. This method of redirecting the exhaust by strategically
placing a flap in the airstream was known as the "Coanda effect," named
after its discoverer, Henri Coanda, a Romanian engineer who had been linked
to the German saucer experiments during the Second World War. The effect
helped to create the ground cushion. On landing, this ground cushion would
act to dampen any sudden impact. In forward flight, the same flaps would
redirect the exhaust backwards with air provided from the forward-facing
intakes. The craft was expected to attain speeds of between 1,720 and 2,300
mph and reach a maximum height of between 71,000 and 80,600 feet, with
a capability to hover as high as 18,000 feet.
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It Came From Outer
Toronto...
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Avro Canada is best
remembered for the CF-105 Arrow, the supersonic jet fighter cancelled by
Ottawa in 1959. Now, newly-released CIA documents shed new light on another
of the company's dreams - a flying saucer.
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The year was 1952 and
the Cold War was at full chill. The House Un-American Activities Committee
was looking for reds under beds, and UFO sightings were spreading like
an epidemic across the United States. Even Air Force pilots reported being
pursued by flying saucers. The sense of dread was turning to frenzy, and
the CIA decided something had to be done.
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In one of many memos
on the subject, H. Marshall Chadwell, deputy head of the agency's Office
of Scientific Intelligence, declared that "something was going on that
must have immediate attention." He and others in the CIA were concerned
that the Soviet Union was developing a secret weapon based on the "flying
discs" that the Nazis had been rumoured to have constructed in the last
months of the Second World War.
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Recently released documents
from the CIA archive are full of accounts by former German scientists of
their desperate work to save the Fatherland
with revolutionary circular aircraft supposedly capable of enormous speeds.
But when the CIA set up a study group in 1952 to look into the phenomenon,
it discovered something extraordinary far closer to home: In Canada, British
and Canadian engineers were in the process of building a flying saucer
of their own.
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It was called Project
Y, a Canadian venture into the unknown that was, for much of the 1950s,
perhaps the most secret aviation project in the West. Half a century later,
the Project Y story remains a remarkable chapter in the history of aerial
design, an idea that came tantalizingly close to breaking all the rules
of the sky, before collapsing in bitter disappointment for lack of money
and faith.
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Back
in the '50s, the news that Canadians were building a flying saucer set
off alarm bells at the CIA. Was the United States being left behind by
its staunchest allies in the race for a technological edge? And if Canada
could build a flying saucer, then surely the Soviet Union wouldn't be too
far behind.
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Mr. Chadwell wanted
answers. The sense of urgency is tangible in a memorandum he sent in June
of 1954 to his department heads, demanding reports on "the use by any foreign
power or nation of non-conventional types of air vehicles, such as or similar
to the 'saucer like' planes presently under development by the Anglo/Canadian
efforts."
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While CIA agents were
dispatched to watch eastern skies for flying saucers, U.S. Air Force officers
were visiting Malton, just outside Toronto, the headquarters of Avro Aircraft,
a subsidiary of A. V. Roe Canada Ltd. and the British Hawker Siddeley Group.
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After the war, Avro
Aircraft, in Malton, Ontario was the place to be for hotshot aircraft designers
fleeing Britain's doomed aviation industry. Among them was a supremely
talented 31-year-old, John Frost, who had already earned a reputation for
unorthodox design with the sleek de Havilland 108, a swallow-shaped research
plane and arguably one of the most beautiful aircraft of all time.
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Mr.
Frost was brought to Avro Canada to work on the CF-100 fighter, a design
he never really liked. He soon became obsessed with far more radical departures
from orthodoxy. It is unclear whether he drew inspiration from the increasingly
widespread popular legend of alien-piloted flying saucers skimming through
the postwar skies, or how much he relied on previous research.
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He would have known
about the "Coanda effect," named after a French Romanian inventor, Henri-Marie
Coanda, who experimented with the first rudimentary jet engine as early
as 1910. He found that a turbojet would not only provide thrust; by sucking
in air, it could also create a vacuum above the wing and thereby produce
extra lift.
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There is plenty of evidence
that, in the closing stages of the Second World War, the Nazis began to
experiment with secret weapons built around the Coanda effect. Among the
documents in the CIA's "X-File" archives is an interview given by a German
aeronautical engineer, Georg Klein, who claimed to have worked on a flying
saucer under the supervision of Luftwaffe designers Rudolf Schriever and
Richard Miethe.
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Another document from
the archives is a 1950 article written by a German émigré
in Chile, Eduard Ludwig. The article, submitted to a Chilean magazine but
apparently never published, was titled "The mystery of 'flying discs' --
a contribution to its possible explanation." It recounted Dr. Ludwig's
wartime work at a Junkers research facility, where he helped to develop
a "one-piece metal wing" functioning as a "speedily rotating top" capable
of vertical takeoff and high speeds.
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"The experiments turned
out to be extremely difficult and involved many casualties," Dr. Ludwig
observed drily, clearly rueful that the spinning-top experiments had not
come to fruition before the arrival of the Red Army.
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He concluded: "The future
will show whether the 'flying discs' are only the products of imagination
or whether they are the results of a far-advanced German science which
possibly, as well as the nearly finished atomic bombs, may have fallen
into the hands of the Russians."
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Some of the Luftwaffe's
top engineers did, indeed, end up in Moscow, while a handful, such as Wernher
von Braun and Dr. Miethe, were spirited away to the West. Dr. von Braun,
of course, became the father of the U.S. space program. No one seems sure
what became of Dr. Miethe.
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In his own work at Malton,
John Frost seemed to be groping his way. He was in search of the aeronautical
holy grail of the age, the vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) craft, but
he began his research on a spade-shaped craft before settling in 1953 on
a disc. The original concept called for a single flat turbojet to draw
in air from above and force it out through nozzles around the edge of the
craft. It would be kept aloft by a cushion of air and pulled upward by
the Coanda effect.
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The early work was carried
out in total secrecy; only a handful of Avro workers were told what was
going on. "It was so secret that when Frost would come to the welding shop,
he would sketch the piece he wanted on some paper and, when we had finished,
we had to put the sketch in a special garbage bag," Alex Raeburn, Avro's
workshop superintendent at the time, recalls.
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Verne Morse, a company
photographer, was made privy to the secret only once it had begun to take
shape. "There was a stupid rumour going around the plant that we were building
a flying saucer, and everybody was laughing about it," he says. "Then one
day I was called in by security, and I was told I needed clearance because
we were building a flying saucer.
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"My first impression
was that this was ridiculous," but when he was taken past the guards, through
Project Y's double doors, and saw the smooth metal disc taking shape, he
was speechless. "It was a sense of 'Wow!' Just real awe."
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But Project Y's first
year was proving troublesome. The jet engine blew so hot it melted the
steel structure of the craft, and its violent shaking would pop the rivets.
When the U.S. Air Force officers arrived in September of 1953, the Canadian
government, having spent $400,000 on the project, was glad to hand over
the reins to a bigger sponsor. A.V. Roe, having failed to squeeze funds
out of the British government, also welcomed the Americans with open arms.
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In
1955, Project Y became the U.S. Defence Department's weapon system 606A,
and a white USAF star was painted on the prototype's fuselage. Millions
were now being poured into the project, and the cult of secrecy deepened
yet further.
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Mr. Raeburn recalls
the day in 1955 that the U.S. Navy came to take the prototype away for
wind-tunnel tests near Los Angeles. "We loaded it on a flatbed truck in
the middle of the night. The police shut off all the traffic right down
to Toronto harbour, and they put it on a U.S. tugboat. They even had one
of our men sworn in to the U.S. Navy so he could go with it, along the
Erie Canal, along the New York intercoastal waterway, and through the Panama
Canal."
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With the help of U.S.
financing, Mr. Frost had redesigned the original concept, placing three
small jet engines around a central fan that would suck in the air through
a circular intake at the centre of the disc. The pilot would sit in a little
oval cockpit to one side under a perspex bubble.
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But the wind-tunnel
tests suggested that secret weapon 606A had severe stability problems and
was in constant danger of flipping over like a stiff pancake once the throttles
were opened on its jets. Mr. Frost and his assistants tinkered away at
the problems for another year, but had
still not mastered them by the winter of 1960 when Spud Potocki, a former
Polish air force flier, took the prototype for its first flight.
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Ernie Happe, another
British engineer, was one of the few allowed to watch. "We were standing
around it, and it was tethered with three cables to stop it flipping. It
just went up a couple of feet off the ground, and Potocki was sitting in
the cabin fiddling around with the controls, trying to make it do what
it was supposed to."
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Over the next few months,
as Mr. Potocki attained a feel for the delicate controls, he was allowed
to roam around the Avro compound, dodging
in and out of hangars. Mr. Raeburn would often look out of his workshop
window and see it floating by. "He would go up and down and hover over
the concrete apron and look in the doors of the hangars. I remember the
wind would suck the ice off the puddles and they would float around in
the air like plates of glass."
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Avro's management was
overjoyed to see its flying saucer take to the air. The publicity department
began designing brochures to capitalize on the aircraft's boundless potential
for the day when the shroud of secrecy would drop away. It was to be called
the Avrocar, and it would spawn a string of civilian and military spinoffs.
There would be an Avrowagon for the family of the future, an Avroangel
(an air ambulance that would zip to the scene of an accident and land on
the spot) and an Avropelican for air-sea rescues and anti-submarine warfare.
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Ken Palfrey, a draughtsman
on the project, remembers Mr. Frost's far-reaching hopes. "He was planning
to make one four times as big, to move
troops in and out of battle, like helicopters do now."
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The giant troop carriers
would lurk under the enemy radar, drop their passengers and then zip into
the stratosphere before the other side even spotted them. Mr. Happe recalls
Mr. Frost excitedly visualizing the craft bouncing off the upper layers
of the atmosphere, crossing continents in a single bound.
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The reality was more
mundane. The Avrocar hovered happily close to solid ground but became dangerously
unstable at heights over 2.5 metres, however much Spud Potocki struggled
with the controls. The USAF wanted to fit it with a tailplane to test whether
that would correct the problem, but Mr. Frost, a design purist, refused
to countenance the idea. "He wouldn't have it," Mr. Palfrey recalls. "When
the Americans suggested that, it was about the only time I ever saw him
angry."
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Mr. Frost insisted he
could fix the problems, but the U.S. military was rapidly losing interest.
After spending $7.5-million, the Defence Department pulled the plug at
the end of 1961, killing the Avrocar. Mr. Frost left the country a bitter
man. "He was completely fed up," Mr. Palfrey says. "It was a sad story.
He was a fine guy. A gentleman."
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The designer ended up
in Auckland, where he spent the rest of his days dreaming up gadgets for
Air New Zealand, such as a hydraulic tail dock to allow engineers easy
access to commercial planes. But it was small potatos compared to the cosmic
ambitions of Project Y, and the sense of betrayal was as keen as ever when
he finally retired in May of 1979.
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In his valedictory interviews,
Mr. Frost told the local press that he had been
robbed of credit for inventing the Hovercraft by Sir Christopher Cockerell.
The irony was that, at Malton, Mr. Frost's eyes had been so set on the
skies he failed to spot the Avrocar's ground-hugging potential. Within
a few days of leaving his job, he died. He was 63.
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The legend of Project
Y lives on in the Web pages of committed ufologists. Some speculate that
it had been a stunning success, and the litany of design errors and disappointments
recalled by Avro veterans was merely a cover story. Others believe the
project was merely a smokescreen for the Pentagon's "real" flying saucer
project being masterminded in secret bases such as Roswell, perhaps by
mysterious superannuated Nazis such as Dr Miethe.
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As for secret weapon
606A, the prototype is gathering dust in a corner of a Maryland warehouse
that serves as a storage facility for the National
Air and Space Museum. Jack Walker, a veteran pilot who shows visitors around,
cannot understand why anyone would want to see it, and warns visitors not
to get too close lest they be abducted by aliens.
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The burnished metal
disc, about 15 metres across, is lying unsung and forlorn under the wing
of a Second World War Black Widow fighter. The perspex bubble over the
cabin has been removed, and its instrument panel is in a cardboard box
somewhere else. But you can still see where the edges were charred in the
effort to get John Frost's futuristic vision off the ground.
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Gallery - VZ-9V Avrocar Flying Disc |
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This is from the Regina Leader Post on
Friday,
December 3, 1954:
(The dates just somehow don't make sense!)
Saucer project shelved
* * * C. D. Howe [known as the Minister of
Everything] reveals $100,000,000 craft worthless
LONDON (Reuters) - Trade Minister Howe said Thursday
that Canadian scientists worked for about 18 months on a $100,000,000 flying
saucer project but it was finally shelved.
Howe ... said the Avro Canada firm planned the
oval-shaped aircraft but finally dropped it.
"We did the engineering on it and proved to ourselves
that it would fly but we did not carry it to the mock-up stage because
it did not seem to have any useful purpose." he said.
"It cost about $100,000,000 to develop and did
not seem sufficiently promising to be worth going with"
????
This would appear to be an artist's rendering
of a somewhat advanced version of an Avrocar!
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Original
material and HTML:
©
The Avro Canada Archives -- 1996-2000
©
david mackechnie photo/graphics -- 1980-2000
(Updated 15 September
2000 - 1930 edt)
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