The Arrow would have been a single-role aircraft in the exact guise of the Convair F-106 Delta Dart interceptor, which flew in 1956, two years before the Arrow, and had equally limited utility. By the early 1960s, the Soviet bomber threat was replaced by ICBMs, and the world's air forces now wanted multi-role aircraft for their regional conflicts. The F-4 Phantom II, which had its maiden flight the same year, 1958 as the Arrow, as was produced until 1981, serving in over a dozen air forces, marked this change from fast interceptors to multi-role fighters. Another trend marker was the Dassault Mirage III, the pre-eminent multi-role fighter of the 1960s and 1970s Arab-Israeli wars first flew in 1956. No, the Arrow was a good attempt at a dead idea, akin to building a big-gun battleship in 1960.
