RF8

In 1969, General Gavoille — a wartime contemporary of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — visited Fournier and was reportedly frustrated that French officials had let Fournier's production drift to Germany without comment. He pushed the French administration to act, and after eight months of lobbying, a state loan was secured to fund a two-seat, all-metal motorglider.

Fournier's own design office did the engineering; construction was carried out by Indraéro at Argenton-sur-Creuse. Four years of work led to a first flight on 19 January 1973, registered F-WSOY. Around a hundred hours of test flying confirmed the design worked well — but the funding needed to move from prototype to series production never materialised, and Indraéro couldn't carry the project alone. Only the single prototype was ever built. Donated to the museum in June 2013, it sat unrestored for several years before volunteers brought it back to display condition; it went on public show at Espace Air Passion, Angers-Marcé, in September 2017.

Writing in Pilot magazine in 1988, Bernard Chabbert — who'd flown most of the Fournier family — picked the RF8 as his favourite of them all: a tandem-seat, retractable-monowheel military trainer he called "the poor man's U-2," built to a configuration deliberately echoing Lockheed's spy plane. The full profile is on the Magazine Shelf.