Canadair CL-13 Sabre: Started by the Yanks, Made an Absolute Beast By Canada

The story of the Canadair Sabre is one written through Canada's ambitions to rely only partially on American imports to make their way through the Cold War. Even if it meant building American hardware on Canadian soil, so long as the factories kept rolling, Canada was going to take what it could get its hands on and upgrade it to the point of near perfection. But to get there, we need to understand what being a Canadian aerospace engineer in the very early Cold War was like.

Then still very much a part of the British Empire, Canada's military-industrial might not have been as high-profile as what took place in the U.S., but it was nothing short of vital to the ultimate success of the war effort over all theaters of war. Under the government of Canada's tenth Prime Minister W. L. Mackenzie King, fruitful collaborations with British aerospace companies like North American, Fairchild, Vickers, Avro Canada, de Havilland Canada, and the iconic Victory Aircraft factory defined Canada's place in the sky during the war.

Thousands of Avro Lancaster bombers, Hawker Hurricane fighters, and T-6 Texan (Harvard) trainers proved to be one of Canada's greatest additions to the Allied war effort. No sooner were Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany crushed into submission did a far more potentially-lethal new foe arise, the Soviet Union. Through Canada's addition to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), major cities like Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, and Vancouver suddenly became targets for Warsaw Pact nations to bathe in nuclear fire, no different than Washington D.C., Paris, or London.

With such potentially dire stakes at hand, modernizing its military to the point where it was nearly parallel with the U.S. and the rest of NATO was the utmost priority for the bigwigs in Ottawa. A new Prime Minister, the Quebecois Louis St. Laurent, took power in November 1948. His administration would see the Canadian aerospace sector undergo a radical transformation, one that saw it remain relevant on the international stage in the era of jets.

Among the mix in a sea of ambitious and capable Canadian military contractors was Canadair. Formed from what remained of a failed venture by the British Vickers Limited company to build aircraft in Montreal, the firm started off fairly sensibly. Its first major products to leave factory floors included license-built copies of already-popular American warbirds like the Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boat and the Douglas DC-4 airliner, dubbed the Canadair North Star.

As the 40s gave way to the 1950s, an American company by the name of the Electric Boat Company (EBC) purchased a controlling interest in Canadair. EBC themselves opted to absorb the two companies into a single uber-recourse-wealthy conglomerate we know today as General Dynamics. By 1954, General Dynamics had purchased another American aeronautical juggernaut in Convair, makers of the colossal B-36 Peacemaker strategic bomber. When the dust settled from this merger, Canadair wound up as the official Canadian sub-division of Convair.

With a wealth of new American resources at its disposal, Canadair was able to delve head-on into the exciting new realm of turbojet engines. But even before this grand merger, a formal agreement between Canadair and North American Aviation was reached in 1948 to make the then brand-new F-86 Sabre Canada's new front-line jet fighter. In its earliest stages, concerns that such a new, scrappy aerospace company could handle the demand of building Canada's jet fighters permeated the program. So, a modest production order for ten airframes was called for to test Canadair's metal with a high-stress production contract.

In its initial CL-13 Mk.1 configuration, the Canadair Sabre was more or less exactly the same as the North American F-86A. This included the same General Electric J47 turbojet engine present in early American adaptations of the Sabre platform. In this configuration, early Sabers were still incredibly potent airframes. These warbirds were even capable of breaching the supersonic barrier, or Mach one, in a steep dive from altitude.

With six 50-caliber M3 machine guns arranged with three on either side of the front inlet, Canadair Sabers, even primitive early examples, could snipe enemy pilots from well beyond the range of where Soviet fighters could fire accurately with their high-caliber autocannons instead. Only a single Mk.1 CL-13 was manufactured and flown for the first time on August 9th, 1950. It was just in time for the first in a series of several Cold War proxy wars, the Korean War, to kick off just months earlier.

With the skies above the 38th Parallel raging, a production order once set at ten swelled to 100 aircraft. Though the first 20 units in the first production run of Mk.2 CL-13s were mechanically similar to the first, the rest built after this point were made unique with the addition of what's known as a stabilator. Otherwise known as an all-flying tailplane, this special horizontal stabilizer has a much larger free range of motion about all its axes in flight, essentially doing the job of a horizontal stabilizer as well as an elevator, all in a single unit. Similar systems were also employed on the North American F-86E, of which some were built by Canadair.

This addition was a watershed moment for the CL-13, the point where Canadair Sabres began to differentiate themselves from the North American Aviation-built airframes they were inspired by. At least 350 CL-13 Mk.2s were built in this manner, but it wasn't the end of the innovation at Canadair. The sole-existing Mk.3 CL-13 was the first to employ an all-new, all-Canadian turbojet engine to replace the imported General Electric engines employed up to that point. It was dubbed the Avro Canada TR5 Orenda.

With 7,500 lbs (33 kN) of thrust to work with over a J47's 5,970 lbs(26.56 kN), the results were a jet that could climb, dive, and maneuver quite unlike any other fighter in the NATO arsenal at that time. The CL-13 Mk.4 put the Mk.3's technological innovations into production, with at least 438 built in this fashion. Most of these aircraft, believe it or not, were delivered to the British Royal Air Force while a smaller consortium made their way to RCAF squadrons. The Canadair Sabre had a remarkably storied career outside RCAF service, too.

From the RAF to Honduras, Greece, Columbia, Italy, Turkey, South Africa, West Germany, and even a few squadrons of U.S. Air Force pilots, they all found use for the CL-13 within their ranks. This was especially the case when the CL-13 Mk.5, with an upgraded Orenda 10 engine variant, and the Mk.6, with its Orenda 14 variant, jetted 7,440 lbs (33.1 kN) of thrust on takeoff. Add in a set of leading-edge wing slats that cut through high-speed turbulent air like a hot knife through butter in tighter maneuvers, and later variants of the CL-13 were some of the most potent fighters of the 1950s.

It was a fact that American pilots discovered during the Korean War when CL-13s clashed toe-to-toe with North Korean Mikoyan-Gurevitch MiG-15 jets, often flown by Soviet pilots in secret. A lucky handful of late-model Mk.6 CL-13s were even fitted with AIM-9B Sidewinder infra-red, heat-seeking, air-to-air missiles, the first Canadian fighter jets to receive the privilege. In the hands of America's most-skilled female pilot of the day, Jacqueline Cochran, the sole Mk.3 CL-13 absolutely smashed the women's world record for airspeed in a closed 9.3-mile (15-km) circuit, reaching 670 mph (1,078 kph) all the while.

Add in a stint as the founding aircraft for the RCAF's aerial acrobatics squadron and its place as one of the most deadly planes at its battle ranking in Gainjin Entertainment's combat game War Thunder, and the Canadair Saber is one of if not the most respected Canadian fighter jet in history.