The Avro Canada CF-103 was a Canadian interceptor that never went beyond the improvised mock-up stage.
When the Canuck was still being designed, studies were already being carried out about it's development as the Royal Canadian Air Force was already looking for a high speed interceptor. Due to the Canuck's straight wing, chief designer John Frost, proposed a thinner swept wing. In December 1950 the design office decided to proceed with a redesign, basically adding swept wings to the CF-100 fuselage. It was also considered to have two streamlined fuel tanks blended into the leading edge of the wings near the three quarter position.
In spite of it's more powerful engines it was planned to reach a diving speed of mach 0.95 only marginally better than the Canuck Mk.2 and Mk.3.
In 1951 the Canadian Department of Trade and Commerce two prototypes and a static test airframe with the CF-103 designation. A wind tunnel test was carried out in November 1951 and a mock-up was built without undercarriage and engines with two tail wings configurations tested.
During the same year, when the test pilot Janusz Zurakowski flew the Canuck, it was evident that it was better than the predicted tests of the CF-103, so the design team tried to redesign it. The initial maiden flight date was expected to be the summer of 1952 but it was postpooned to mid-1953, however as the Cold War increased, the Canadian government made pressure to concentrate the aircraft manufacturing efforts on the CF-100 Canuck leading to the definitive cancellation of the CF-103 project in December 1951.
The mock-up was left at the factory's experimental bay with hopes of recovering the project, however in December 1952 Zurakowski achieved mach 1.06 with a Canuck Mk.4 in an unauthorized test flight, which leaded to the scrapping of the mock-up.
Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_CF-103
2. http://canuck.purpleglen.com/cf103.html
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