Meet G-AVWY

A ten-year restoration project changes hands by accident, gets finished in British racing green, and turns out to have a Skyhawks past nobody had mentioned.

By Peter Turner

← UK Fournier Club

I'd always admired the Fournier designs, and although I'd never flown an RF-4 it struck me as the most elegant of the family. How I ended up owning one, a 1967 Sportavia RF-4D registered G-AVWY, was rather more accident than design.

A flying colleague named Brian had been restoring 'WY for ten years without quite getting there, and was about to move to New Zealand. It was very much his project, and he wanted it to go to someone he could trust to finish the job properly. Knowing I was an enthusiastic glider and motor glider pilot and instructor, he asked if I'd be interested. I already had shares in a Dimona and an Emeraude, and a day job flying HS125s, Citations and a Hughes 500 — the honest answer was that I didn't need another aeroplane. I looked her over anyway, found she still needed a great deal of work despite the years already spent on her, and expressed only mild interest. A week before Brian was due to leave the country, he called to twist my arm, having turned down the usual time-wasters. My heart won out over my wallet.

An Ugly Chin

After delays with engine problems and British weather, a ferry permit finally came through and 'WY arrived at Gloucestershire Airport on a cold, clear February day — at which point I rather regretted the decision. She'd sprouted an ugly engine cowling "chin" that ruined her lines completely, and clearly needed a lot more work than I'd bargained for. I flew her straight on to Nympsfield, where Roger Targett Sailplane Services took on the restoration. Roger, who besides gliders had plenty of experience with PFA types including the RF-4, immediately reassured me the chin was unnecessary and reduced the aircraft to a kit of parts to start again properly.

Choosing a colour scheme was surprisingly high on the agenda. I settled on one of René Fournier's own schemes — British racing green and white — and it later turned out, by coincidence, to have been her original factory colours. Watching the fuselage re-emerge in that scheme, with a high-gloss finish, was one of the highlights of the whole project. We fitted a dual battery system (she has no generator or alternator), a Becker VHF and a Garmin Pilot III GPS, and rebuilt the seat entirely in energy-absorbing foam and blue leather to fit me — one of several small eccentricities I indulged along the way, including swapping the ASI for one calibrated in knots.

Somewhere in the process I joined Club Fournier International, the owners' association, and ran into Tizzy Hodson, who had flown 'WY during its time with the Unipart Aerobatic Team in the 1980s. She lent me old photographs and a video — another piece of the aircraft's history restored alongside the airframe itself.

First Flight, and a 25th Anniversary

By early June 2000 she was ready. Dave Bland, who worked with Roger and part-owns another Nympsfield-based RF-4, flew the test flight, and that same evening I flew her home to Halesland, the Mendip Gliding Club's airfield — a considerable contrast to the ugly duckling that had arrived at Gloucester four months earlier. The next day happened to be the club's 25th anniversary, which along with the PFA Rally at Cranfield had been our target for finishing the project. We made both. At Cranfield I met other Club Fournier International members, including a group who'd flown over from France, Germany and Italy as part of one of the club's annual European tours — one of their RF-4s, D-KAQI, had an extra fuel tank fitted behind the seat purely to keep up with the RF-5s on those trips.

G-AVWY at a glance

1967 Sportavia RF-4D, wood and fabric construction, one-piece detachable wing and tailplane
Acro-converted 1,600cc VW-derived engine with a Ken Fern wooden propeller
PFA Permit-to-Fly, day/VFR only; cleared for spinning, loops, slow rolls, rolls off the top, stall turns and inverted flight (engine stopped)
Vne 134 knots; placarded aerobatic limits +4/-2g (structural limits were originally +11/-6g)
Dual 12V battery system in place of a generator/alternator, each good for over ten flying hours
Cruise: ~90kt touring at 3,200rpm (≈3 gph); ~52kt "sightseeing" mode at 2,200rpm (≈1 gph)
Best glide 1:20 at 62kt; minimum sink 240fpm at 56kt
Landing roll around 110m in still air; take-off run around 130m to a 50ft screen height of 270m

Flying Her

Starting is a single-handed procedure done from behind the propeller on the port side — mag off, fuel on, throttle set, choke on, four sucks-in, two shots of Ki-gas primer, then a couple of swings and she generally fires. It looked faintly alarming the first time I watched it done and felt little different once I was doing it myself, provided the usual precautions were kept. Visibility from the cockpit, once you're in, is glider-like — a 340-degree panorama helped by the high seating position, with the only real blind spot below the nose, as with any low-wing aircraft.

Aerobatically she's remarkably forgiving: the first loop I ever flew in her came straight back through my own entry slipstream, and it kept happening, not through any particular skill on my part but because the aircraft is simply that crisp to fly. Rolls take longer to get accurate given the long span and limited power — my son-in-law Paul had it cracked well before I did. Stalls are gentle, occurring around forty knots with five knots' warning and no buffet; spins are quick to develop but recover predictably within a quarter turn once you know the technique.

Is a single seat a real downside? Perhaps. Everything else about the RF-4 — touring, aerobatics, gliding, or just poddling around the Somerset countryside on a summer evening at 1,000 feet — makes it, in my entirely biased opinion, something close to a dream to own.

Sidebar: sundry Fournier aerobatic tips

A collection of speeds, techniques and near misses passed between owners over the years — some of it overlaps with Bob Grimstead's own notes archived elsewhere on this site, but it's worth keeping the different voices together.

Reference speeds (from memory, one contributor's own numbers): climb 65–70mph; cruise 110mph at 3,000rpm; loop entry 125mph; stall turn entry 120mph, kicking rudder at 48mph (it won't go left for everyone); roll entry 115mph; roll-off-the-top 135mph; barrel roll 125mph; inverted flight, 100mph; downwind, 68mph. John Taylor, who part-owned RF-4 G-AWLZ at Nympsfield, quoted slightly different figures of his own: loop at 110kt, slow roll at 100kt, snap roll at 55kt, G-limits +6/-3.

A near miss at height. One RSA contributor described a display sequence where, mid-way through a vertical down roll, he accidentally stowed the airbrakes he'd deployed to control his speed — and found himself well past Vne, watching the wings flex further than he'd ever seen, before recovering into the rest of his routine. His conclusion: the RF4D "is very well built" — but airbrakes have been known to pop out unexpectedly at 118mph even when nobody touches the lever, with no damage resulting.

Stall turns are the manoeuvre most contributors admit to struggling with early on — "penduluming through the vertical" and "a face full of earth" are common early experiences. The technique that seems to work: a firm pull to the vertical rather than a steady one (a Fournier going aerobatic is, as more than one pilot put it, "a glider with noise in front" and steady pulls simply bleed off too much energy in the transition), left rudder fed in on the way up, then a firm boot of right rudder as speed bleeds through the high forties.

Loops, Cubans, and the "toilet paper" trick. A straight loop starts level at around 113mph, diving briefly for speed, with wings checked against the horizon at each quarter. Cuban eights need the 45-degree down line held firmly — not 60 degrees — with a touch of airbrake on the way down if speed builds too fast. For display flying, a length of barrier tape tied to the tailwheel and outriggers gives a visible trail for a fraction of the cost and drag of real smoke — one pilot reported no measurable yaw even with tape on only one outrigger.

General caution, from more than one contributor: never fly aerobatics without proper dual instruction first — the RF-4 is slippery enough to run past Vne quickly going downhill, and its light elevator makes it easy to exceed the aircraft's g-limits without quite meaning to. Any slack in the controls risks flutter, which can fail a structure in an instant. Alan Cassidy's Better Aerobatics was recommended repeatedly as the standard reference to learn from before attempting any of the above.

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