ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

74 The Hunt for Zero Point
reported that the company was working on a "flying saucer" that could
take off and land vertically and would fly at 1,500 mph. British and
American scientists were also reported to be involved. Both the Canadian
government and Avro played down the reports.
When the Avrocar finally emerged from the shadows it was easy to see
why. One look at the prototype was enough to know that it would never
achieve supersonic flight. Flight tests, in fact, confirmed it was a dog.
Underpowered and unstable, the Avrocar made its first untethered
flight in December 1959 and soldiered on for two more years as Frost and
his team sought to overcome its failings.
By the end of 1961, at the conclusion of the U.S. development
contract, the Avrocar had managed to claw no more than a few feet into
the air. Funding for the world's only known flying-saucer program was
not renewed and the Avrocar drifted into obscurity—although not fast
enough for the Canadian aerospace industry, which has sought ever since
to distance itself from the project. There and elsewhere, it has become a
byword for failure; something of an aviation joke.
Yet, that may have been the intention all along.
Recently declassified papers show that from early 1952 right up until
the cancellation of the Avrocar in 1961, a select group of engineers known
as the Avro "Special Projects Group," led by John Frost, had been
working on a highly classified set of programs that accurately reflected
the Toronto Star's original leak of 1953.
The papers revealed that, commencing with Project Y, also known as
the "Manta," via Project 1794 to Project PV 704, the SPG tested technology
for a whole family of flying saucers whose projected performance
was designed to eclipse that of all other jet fighters. Data on Project 1794,
a design for a perfectly circular fighter-interceptor, show that it would
have been capable of Mach 4 at 100,000 feet. The best fighters then on
the drawing board were hard-pressed to achieve Mach 2.
On December 2,1954, Canada's Trade Minister C.D. Howe sought to
dampen speculation about the existence of an Avro flying saucer program
with a statement that the Canadian government had backed studies into
disc-shaped aircraft in 1952-53, but had since dropped the idea.
This, as it turned out, was true—up to a point. In fact, the Avro
design, now called Project Y2, had been purchased outright by the U.S.
Air Force and re-code-named "Project Silverbug."
Under pressure from the U.S. press to reveal the nature of this
program—which, though classified, had again leaked—the USAF issued
a bland statement in 1955 that it had a "research and development