RF6 / RF6B

By the early 1970s a strong Deutschmark made German exports harder and imports easier, and American-style trainers — tricycle gear, side-by-side seating, wheel rather than stick, modest handling — were flooding into Germany. Wanting a share of that market, Sportavia's Alfons Pützer asked Fournier's design office for a three-seat tourer, the RF6, which Fournier himself thought could never compete on price. It first flew in March 1973, but that autumn's OPEC oil crisis hit before it could reach production; Sportavia abandoned it, along with the rest of its Fournier range.

In parallel, Fournier had been developing his own answer aimed squarely at flight schools: a genuine two-seat trainer capable of proper stick-and-rudder handling and basic aerobatics, rather than an American-style docile tourer. Built on the RF6's airframe but using the Cessna 150's 100hp Continental O-200, this became the RF6B — "B" for biplace, two-seater. It first flew on 12 March 1974 at Nitray, flown by test pilot Bernard Chauvreau, and received its French type certificate on 26 April 1975. With Sportavia gone, Fournier funded production himself, mortgaging his own assets to do it. Series production ran from March 1976, at a rate of up to five a month, until funding collapsed on 30 May 1977 — by which point 45 RF6Bs had been built at Nitray, most bought by French flying clubs and schools who wanted something livelier than a Cessna 150 or Piper Cherokee. Slingsby subsequently bought the remaining assets and tooling, developing the design into the composite T67 Firefly — 271 of which were eventually built, dwarfing the original run more than sixfold.

Today the type certificate — always held personally by René Fournier rather than a company — has become a genuine liability for owners: EASA revoked it after Fournier, by then in his late nineties, was unable to pay a new annual Type Certificate holder's fee. That leaves the small number of surviving RF6Bs (around 25 still flying, almost all in France) as orphans, caught between onerous EASA maintenance rules and eligibility questions for a UK Permit to Fly. UK owner and display pilot Bob Grimstead has documented the whole saga — buying, transporting, and battling the bureaucracy around two separate RF6Bs, including the actual 1974 prototype — in a five-part Pilot magazine series on the Magazine Shelf.

A related derivative worth noting for UK owners: the RF6C, marketed as the RS180 Sportsman, appears on the UK register as a single example.