When, at the beginning of the 1970s, many air forces realised that advanced pilot training would become significantly more expensive due to new, technologically advanced systems, they looked for an alternative that would offer the flight characteristics of a jet aircraft on the one hand and the low costs of a propeller-driven aircraft on the other.
The aircraft construction company Rhein-Flugzeugbau in Mönchengladbach had already gained extensive experience in the application of jacketed propeller drives at the end of the sixties. Using the jacketed propeller test vehicle RFB Sirius, Hanno Fischer was able to demonstrate the jet-like behaviour of an aircraft operated with a jacketed propeller located in the fuselage behind the cockpit as early as 1968. At the ILA 1970 Rhein-Flugzeugbau presented to the public for the first time project sketches of a civil passenger aircraft and a military trainer powered by a jacketed propeller. This first Fantrainer design, like the Sirius I which was being tested at the time, still had a low-lying tailplane. The civil and military aircraft differed only in the cockpit section in front of the jacketed propeller, which was to be interchangeable in order to be able to adapt this part to the respective target pattern as quickly as possible in the future.
Since the Luftwaffe showed no interest in the development in 1970, Rhein-Flugzeugbau, after completion of the Sirius trials and with the support of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, began developing the civil variant in 1972 under the name Rhein-Flugzeugbau Fanliner. Only after its successful maiden flight in 1973 did the German Air Force show interest in testing the military variant as a successor to the Piaggio P.149. In March 1975 Rhein-Flugzeugbau received an order from the Federal Ministry of Defence to build two prototypes of the military Fanliner
Further developments
After the FT-600 fan trainer had proven to be underpowered for some tenders, a number of more motorized fan trainer designs had been planned at Rhein-Flugzeugbau since the mid-1980s. The FT-800 , FT-1000, FT-1200 and FT-1500 have become known. The FT-1000 was especially designed as a weapon carrier for a request from Paraguay.
At the beginning of the nineties, the design of the Rhein-Flugzeugbau Tiro-Trainer was created by Rhein-Flugzeugbau under Christoph Fischer. It was to be equipped with a Williams Rolls-Royce FJ44 engine and used modern jacket screw technology, which Hanno Fischer had developed in the late 1980s as part of Whisperfan technology. It was still offered to the Thai Air Force in 1994 as a replacement for the RTAF fan trainer. After leaving the DASA consortium, Rhein-Flugzeugbau had no funds left to implement the design.