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René Fournier (born 1921)

René Fournier was a French aeronautical engineer with almost no formal training in the field — a spell at an aviation mechanics school in Rochefort, wood-and-fabric construction learned from a craftsman named Barret de Nazaris at Cahors, and early guidance from designer and test pilot Charles Fauvel, who flew the RF1's first flight at Cannes. From that unlikely start he spent six decades designing one of the most distinctive families of light aircraft ever produced: motorgliders slender and clean enough to soar for hours with the engine stopped, built from wood, fabric, and later composite, and licensed or copied by manufacturers across Europe, South America and beyond.

His first design, conceived in the late 1940s and finally built in 1960, was the RF1 — what he described as wanting a "poet's aeroplane", closer to a soaring bird than a powered aircraft. Every subsequent RF-series design, from the RF2 through to the composite RF10, worked variations on that same basic formula: a fine, high-aspect wing, a small and often car-derived engine, and enough aerodynamic cleanliness to glide properly once that engine stopped.

Commercially, Fournier's career was a story of near-constant financial hardship set against real engineering success. Production repeatedly moved between companies and countries — Alpavia in France, Sportavia in Germany, later ventures in Spain — as funding ran out, currencies moved against him, or French officials declined to support a domestic industry they didn't fully understand. He was made bankrupt when his own company collapsed in 1977, rebuilt his position working for the buyer who rescued it, and kept designing into his seventies with the RF47. He continued advising former customers and owners informally long after his formal retirement from aviation.

Fournier told his own story in an autobiography, published in French as Mon rêve et mes combats and later translated into English by Bob Grimstead as My Dreams and My Aeroplanes — a title that captures the tone of his career about as well as anything could.

A note on the date above: the most recent confirmation found for this page was a French tribute marking his 103rd birthday in April 2024. We haven't found anything more recent either way — if you have a current update, the contact page is the way to reach us.