I'm very well aware of the Arrow. In point of fact, as I type this reply to you, I'm reading from official documentation of the project. You'll have to forgive me if I find that a smidge more convincing than a secondhand reporting of completely unknown provenance.

It is because of these documents that I feel comfortable in telling you two things: it was not the first aircraft to have on-board computers (unless you have a very strange definition of computer) and it could not climb vertically at Mach 1.9 on 75% power.

To the first point - the Arrow's best claim to the 'first onboard computer' would be its three-axis damping system. And allow me to make something clear - it may well be the first three-axis electrically-controlled damping system which was so critical to flight stability. It was not, however, the first electrically-controlled damping system; these were already being readily accepted for use, for instance in the B-47's yaw damper (which entered service before the Arrow even entered design work). The Arrow's system was no doubt advanced, and was important because without it the airframe had certain conditions that were nigh-unflyable; however, it was not the first.

Similarly, its ground-control flight computer was not the first of its kind. Such systems were present on both the F-102 and F-106, via the SAGE data link, and the F-106 could fly the entire mission excepting takeoff and landing completely controlled by computer. So the Arrow, though again advanced and commendable, was not the first to do it.

Now, let us look at the other claim - the vertical climb. I will be referencing the Avro Arrow Mk. 2 Standard Aircraft Characteristics document, which is available through the Canadian NRC - I'll link it at the bottom. Let us consider the math first, and then we will look at the projected performance from the actual engineers.

The installed Iroqouis is projected to provide 26,000lbf of thrust in full AB, or 17,550 at 'normal' power rating; we'll say that's your 75% throttle setting, to be generous, though it's only 1,000lbf off from mil power. The same document provides a combat weight of 54,000 lbs. So even at full AB, we don't have enough thrust to accelerate vertically, even neglecting drag; at mil or normal power settings we are even further.

But then, perhaps that is unfair. So let us look at what the engineers projected. The absolute maximum steady rate of climb for the CF-105 with the Iroquois is provided to be 44,500 ft/min at sea level. That's at full afterburner, having accelerated to M0.92. That's very respectable. It is not, however, M1.9 in the vertical - it's actually only about 500mph in the vertical. It's also only about 10% better than the F-106, which I should point out actually beats the Arrow to 50,000 feet by quite some margin (4.7minutes vs. 5.13). And we don't think that the F-106 can climb vertically, at 75% throttle, at Mach 1.9, do we?

I think I've proven my point. What the Arrow was as an aircraft is, apparently, up for debate. But while it was no doubt an impressive, capable aircraft - indeed, it had nearly unparalleled high-altitude maneuver for the time - it was not something that would embarrass an F-22 today. It was a great achievement. It was not the be-all and end-all of aircraft. Unless you can provide me direct testimony that these engineers were, in fact, so embarrassingly wrong about the performance of their own aircraft that it should have been capable of more than double their predicted performance, I'll have to take their word for it.