Slingsby T67 Firefly
family of training aircraft
The Slingsby T67 Firefly, originally produced as the Fournier RF-6, is a two-seat aerobatic training aircraft, built by Slingsby Aviation in Kirkbymoorside, Yorkshire, England.
It has been used as a trainer aircraft by several armed forces, as well as civilian operators. In the mid-1990s, the aircraft became controversial in the United States after three fatal accidents during US Air Force training operations. The Firefly has poor spin recovery, and has been involved in at least 36 fatal accidents.
Development
The RF-6 was designed by René Fournier, and first flew on 12 March 1974. An all-wooden construction, it featured a high aspect-ratio wing echoing his earlier motorglider designs. Fournier set up his own factory at Nitray, near Tours to manufacture the design, but after only around 40 had been built, the exercise proved financially unviable, and he was forced to close down production. A four-seat version was under development by Sportavia-Pützer as the RF-6C, but this demonstrated serious stability problems that eventually led to an almost complete redesign as the Sportavia-Pützer RS 180 Sportsman.
In 1981, Fournier sold the development rights of the RF-6B to Slingsby Aviation, which renamed it the T67. The earliest examples, the T67A, were virtually identical to the Fournier-built aircraft, but the design was soon revised to replace the wooden structure with one of composite material.
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This entry incorporates text from “Slingsby T67 Firefly” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.