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René Fournier: The Designer Behind the RF Series

René Fournier was born in April 1921 in the Touraine region of France. After service in the French Air Force at the end of the Second World War, and a brief spell studying aeronautical engineering at Rochefort, he spent the best part of a decade running a business supplying ceramics and school art equipment — all the while sketching an idea that wouldn't leave him alone: a light, efficient aeroplane that could glide as gracefully as it flew under power.

He began drawing that design in 1947, but it took another ten years, and the decision to leave the ceramics trade behind, before he could start building it. Working in a disused laundry in Cannes under the guidance of glider designer Charles Fauvel, and with the help of a craftsman named Jean Rideau, Fournier spent three years turning his sketches into an aircraft: an all-wood, semi-aerobatic machine with slender eleven-metre wings, a single retractable wheel, and a small Volkswagen-derived engine producing barely 27 horsepower. Fauvel flew it for the first time on 30 May 1960. Fournier named it the RF1.

The RF1 was a sensation for its economy alone, cruising at close to 100mph on around eight litres of fuel an hour. It won first prize at that year's French homebuilders' fly-in, and state aviation officials soon began talking about a production version for flying clubs — a conversation that would occupy the next two decades of Fournier's working life and eventually produce the RF3, RF4, RF5, RF6, RF7, RF9 and RF10: the aircraft family this site exists to keep flying.

Fournier's career was defined as much by the aircraft he built as by the certification battles he fought to build them. Several of his best designs were delayed, undersold, or abandoned outright because of currency swings, funding gaps, or airworthiness rules written for aircraft twice their weight. He was ruined financially at least once, in 1977, when the company behind the RF9 collapsed within months of the aircraft's first flight — and was only kept in aviation by a buyer who retained him as chief designer on a reduced salary. He kept designing well into his nineties.

What never wavered was the idea itself. In his autobiography, My Dreams and My Aeroplanes, Fournier described the aircraft he wanted to build as "a poet's plane, designed to float on the air." Fly an RF today, and that description still fits: light, quiet, and — on a good day, in the right air — happy to climb on nothing but a thermal.

From RF1 to RF10: A Short History of the Fournier Family

Every Fournier RF-series aircraft can be traced back to a single prototype, the RF1, first flown in May 1960. What followed was two and a half decades of steady refinement, financial near-misses, and a small number of genuinely excellent aeroplanes — most of which are still flying today, cared for by exactly the kind of owners this site was built for.

RF2 and RF3 — meeting the rules

The RF1 had been built and flown as an amateur homebuilt, free of formal certification requirements. A production version wouldn't be so lucky. The RF2, built with French state backing from 1961, had to meet airworthiness standards written for far heavier aircraft, and ended up twenty kilos overweight with a fragile undercarriage and overpowered airbrakes. Fournier's response was the RF3: lighter, re-certified under a newly created "good glide angle, short landing" category, with smaller spoilers replacing the RF2's airbrakes. Eighty-nine were built between 1963 and 1966 by Alpavia, the company Fournier had formed with Belgian backer Count Antoine d'Assche.

RF4 and RF4D — the masterpiece

After a fatal aerobatic accident involving an RF3, Fournier redesigned the airframe from the spar out: a strengthened structure rated to +12/-6g, sealed pushrod controls in place of cables, and a larger fuel tank. The result, the RF4, is widely regarded as his finest design — capable of intermediate aerobatics, a comfortable three-hour cruise at around 100mph, and known for excellent visibility and handling. Currency pressures moved production to Germany in 1966, where Fournier's new partner Alfons Pützer built it as the RF4D (D for Deutschland) at a rate of six a month, eventually selling 155 of them to thirty countries.

RF5 and RF6 — two seats, then four

Demand for a two-seat version followed almost immediately. The RF5 kept the RF4D's wing planform but added span at the root, tandem seating, and wings that folded to save hangar space. A long-winged RF5B Sperber variant, developed with input from glider designer Manfred Schliwa, traded some handling for genuinely useful soaring performance. Later, under pressure to compete with American tourers flooding into a strengthening German market, Fournier and Pützer developed the RF6 and its two-seat sibling the RF6B — a design Fournier himself was ambivalent about, believing it could never match American prices on cost alone. He was largely right: the 1973 oil crisis all but ended sales, though the RF6B's layout would later live on, considerably reworked, as the Slingsby Firefly trainer used by the RAF and USAF.

RF7, RF9 and RF10 — the later years

The RF7 mated an RF4D fuselage to a shorter, higher-performance wing for aerobatic purists, but was refused certification over its single-ignition engine and never reached production beyond a handful of examples. The RF9, a side-by-side two-seat motor glider, flew in January 1977 with excellent handling and economy — but the company building it ran out of money within months of that first flight, and only twelve were completed before Fournier, by then in his mid-fifties, was left starting over almost from scratch. His last major design, the composite RF10, first flew in 1981 and was eventually built in small numbers in France before the tooling and rights were sold to Aéromot in Brazil, where a developed version continues in production today as the Ximango.

The numbers built were never huge by industry standards — a few dozen of some variants, a couple of hundred of the most popular — but the aircraft have proven remarkably durable. That's the whole premise of this site: there's no factory parts department to call anymore, so keeping an RF flying today means owners passing spares directly to the next owner who needs them.