The Arrow

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For other uses, see Arrow (disambiguation).

The Arrow is a four-hour miniseries produced for CBC Television in 1996, starring Dan Aykroyd as Crawford Gordon, experienced wartime production leader during World War II and president of A. V. Roe Canada during its attempt to produce the Avro Arrow supersonic jet interceptor.

Other significant individuals in the program, portrayed in the series, include RCAF pilot Jack Woodman (Ron White) who conducted test flights on Avro aircraft but was supplanted by Janusz Żurakowski (Lubomir Mykytiuk) for the first few flights; Jim Chamberlin (Aidan Devine) and James Floyd (Nigel Bennett) in the design team; Edward Critchley (Ian D. Clark) who would be asked to develop an engine for the Arrow when other models became unavailable.

The film also boasted cameos by Michael Moriarty as U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Michael Ironside as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Christopher Plummer as George Hees.

Although the miniseries is based on history, it is a work of fiction, employs composite characters, and depicts some events that actually did not take place. It acknowledges that there is no hard evidence to support the fictional final scenes, depicting one Arrow that escaped the torches used to tear the other Arrows apart, in accord with allegations attributed to reporter June Callwood. There are errors in illustrations, such as the wing design (the classified design does not appear on the models used); an Apollo lunar module is shown (during the "destruct and dispose" operation) in its final configuration, although that design was arrived at in the later 1960s out of sheer necessity to reduce weight.

Production may have been inspired in part by Wetaskiwin resident Allan Jackson's efforts to build a full-scale model of the Arrow. The offer was made to complete the model and use it in the miniseries. However, a disservice was done when, to dramatize the torch-cut pieces being hauled away, the model itself (rather than imitation segments) was cut to pieces, the form in which it was returned to Mr. Jackson. As a result, he had to start almost from scratch to reconstruct the Arrow model.

The Arrow models differ slightly from those built in 1957-59, probably due to the classified nature of the project, nobody can be entirely sure how to precisely recreate the wing design that was stable at Mach 2.5 and higher. The entry on the Arrow (the airplane, not the movie) by aviation enthusiast Greg Goebel notes that the moviemakers "borrowed" a full-scale replica of the plane built by Allan Jackson, a Canadian aviation hobbyist. Due to miscommunications, the replica was cut up in the scenes where the completed Arrows were being destroyed, forcing CBC to compensate Jackson.