Fauvel AV-36

Charles Fauvel was born in 1904 at Angers, in France, and following a military flight training scholarship in 1923 he entered the French Air Force Academy. In 1925 he saw his first soaring competition at Vauville, then the centre for gliding in France, which sparked a life-long interest in gliders and motor-gliders. While watching the summer soaring competition there in 1928 Fauvel conceived his idea for a flying wing. Gliders were being built with increasingly long, thin wings to reduce parasitic drag and he reasoned that there was a practical limit to how far this could go; it might be better to reduce the size of the fuselage and cut out the interaction between the wing and tailplane altogether. This led to a patent for a flying wing formula, registered in 1929.

Around fifty AV-36s were built in France as kits with parts supplied by the Wassmer works and about twice as many were built from plans by amateur builders. It was succeeded by the improved AV361; Fauvel’s interest in gliding and designing continued until his death in 1979 when his Gardan Supercab crashed in the Alps.

About this aircraft

The logbook shows this to be the 33rd Fauvel, with a one piece wing, constructed by Wassmer in France (serial 133) in 1955. It had done only about 155 hours and 81 flights before being brought to England in 1972, where it received BGA (British Gliding Association) certification number BGA 1999. It had last flown in 1975 and was later bought by Ian Dunkley who intended to restore it, but instead put his efforts into a two-seater Fauvel AV-22, which he took to New Zealand. 

The Fauvel had been languishing in a barn for nearly 40 years before it was brought to Old Warden. It was then completely restored at Booker in 2014 by Graham Saw.

Specification