The hunt for free-flight models of the legendary AVRO Arrow by the OEX Recovery Group is on again, with an underwater search planned for late spring. The search area will be the bottom of Lake Ontario, in the waters off Prince Edward County’s Point Petre, where flight-testing of scale models of the Arrow took place in the mid-1950s.

Wired to send to ground stations via telemetry valuable data about their aerodynamic stability at supersonic speeds, nine Arrow test models were launch by rocket-propelled Nike missiles and later landed in the water. Recovery of the models was not foreseen at the time; their on-board instruments having sent data about the flight to the ground stations. The idea was that this sort of flight testing would render redundant the need to construct full-scale prototypes.

The OEX Recovery Group is headed up by John Burzynski, president and CEO of publicly traded mining company Osisko Mining Inc. Partners in the group, some of whom provide financial assistance, include other mining companies, major Canadian financial institutions and legal firms, as well as both the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, the RCAF and the Canada Aviation and Space Museum (CASM) in Ottawa.

The same group recovered a Delta test model in 2018, which after restoration is now on display at the CASM. That version, however, was a less sophisticated version and the group is still intent on recovering one of the more elaborate, exact 1/8 scale replicas, if not all of the remaining models.

Below is a photo of the Delta model recovered in 2018.

Photo credit: OEX Recovery Group