Avro Arrow replica unveiled

The Avro Arrow is very much a part of Canadian myth and legend; it would be impossible to summarize the aircraft and its history in 500 words or less. Suffice to say, anyone with even a hint of interest in the history of Canadian technology is aware of the technologically advanced supersonic interceptor of the 1950s and its inglorious end at the hands of politicking and bitter recrimination.

Which is why it was somewhat exciting that a replica of the Arrow has been constructed, and was unofficially unveiled today. An official rollout is scheduled for October 5-7, with an accompanying fund-raiser dinner and a public open house on the Thanksgiving weekend. (This is not the first replica; a previous version was built by an enthusiast in the mid 1990s. It was also used in a 1997 CBC 'docu-drama' entitled "The Arrow".) There are countless books, websites, movies, articles, and anecdotes; far too many to list here, but if you still don't know what's going on here maybe a Heritage Minute will do (flash required).

Super Connie for Sale

In the Globe and Mail today, a short reference was made to a Lockheed Super Constellation passenger aircraft, otherwise known as a Connie. The Connie was a four-engine propeller aircraft built in California by Lockheed in the 1940s and 1950s. Over 800 were build, and the distintive and elegant aircraft flew for nearly 40 years, for both military and commercial purposes.

The specific model in the article was built in 1953 for Trans Canada Airlines, and is perhaps the last surviving model in Canada - for now. The private owner sold it to the Seattle Museum of Flight recently, but was denied an export permit by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board for three months. Several Canadian aviation organizations had protested the sale, and after an independent evaluation the Review Board put a temporary hold on the export deeming it "to be of 'significant' cultural and historical value to Canada." This is intended to provide time for a Canadian group to raise sufficient funds to purchase the Connie at fair value, if possible.

Of course, there are at least two sides of the story. From the United States, we have The Constellation Survivor Website with their interpretation of this recent news, and in Canada a petition at Canadian Super Connie to prevent the export, and the Toronto Aerospace Museum's own record of events.

Bletchley Park in the news and the Canadian connection

A recent news item notes that at Bletchley Park a replica has been built of a Bombe, a codebreaking machine used to crack the WWII German Enigma code. Bletchley Park was home to British codebreaking during the war, and is now a museum with artifacts and exhibits dedicated to the massive wartime effort which took place there.

The bombe was an electromechanical device used by the British to crack the codes generated by the German military's Enigma machines. Though the design of the bombe is often attributed solely to Alan Turing , in fact it was based on earlier work conducted by Polish mathematicians, who contributed a great deal to the cracking of Enigma.

Aside from Turing, thousands of people were employed at Bletchley Park during war; many were recruited for their intellectual ingenuity or even their ability to solve crosswords rapidly. One recruit was William Thomas Tutte, who provides a Canadian connection to the story. Tutte was born in England in 1917, and attended Cambridge University in 1935 to study chemistry, though he held an interest in mathematics. In 1941, as he was beginning graduate research in chemistry he was invited to join the codebreaking work at Bletchley Park.One of Tutte's greatest achievements was to decipher a German military code produced by a Lorenz SZ 40/42 cipher machine -- not the more famous Engima. Remarkably, Tutte managed to deduce the entire structure of the Lorenze machine and a deciphering strategy armed only with intercepted messages. It took too long to decipher messages by hand, so a top secret electronic machine known as Colossus was built at Bletchley Park in 1943. Like the Bombe, a Colossus rebuild project has also been undertaken.

Following the war, Tutte completed his doctorate at Cambridge, but in mathematics, not chemistry. In 1948 H.S.M. Coxeter invited Tutte to join the mathematics faculty at the University of Toronto, where he stayed until 1962. That year he moved some 100km west to the University of Waterloo, where he eventually launched a Department of Combinatorics and Optimization in the Faculty of Mathematics, conducting research and teaching in the mathematical field of graph theory. Tutte is widely acknowledged to have contributed more to graph theory than most anyone else, and in 2001 was awared the honour Officer of the Order of Canada for "his seminal work in the area of graph theory" and his work deciphering the Lorenz codes, "one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II." Tutte died 2 May 2002.

• http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Tutte.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.T._Tutte