On Sunday, November 16, 2014 10:00:10 PM UTC-5, firsys wrote:
It is sad to report that Raouf Ismail, developer of the
Cambridge variometer and founder of Cambridge Aero Instruments
and Cambridge Aeroflow, died on Nov 12th.
He was lifelong friend and will be missed by many.
( private communication.)

John Firth

Raouf was a great friend to Soaring and a big part of the
avionics scene. He came up with the first variometer with
a really stable zero, at reasonable cost - earlier types had
to be manually re-zeroed often (kinda hard in the air).

Personally Raouf was a friend for 40 years. When I was
a student, he encouraged my interest in avionics and
kindly provided parts and guidance for me to rebuild
our club's old Crossfell vario. In the late 70's,
Raouf called me:

"Dave, you need a modern glider, and Schempp-Hirth is
going to build a new world-beater called Ventus. You
need to order one."

Raouf was for some years the USA Schempp-Hirth dealer.

"But Raouf, I've been thinking about buying a house.."
"Dave, you can't fly a house!"
"OK"

Thus I ordered the Ventus, which eventually led to the
infamous "Two gliders, no house, angry fiancee, must
sell one of..." advert in Soaring. To which I got zero
calls (nobody believed I'd sell a glider), but my
fiancee's Dad did fall off the toilet reading the
Soaring adverts...

In the late 1980s, Raouf provided much encouragement
and feedback on my ideas about instrumentation, as
I started what led to the B100 and ILEC SN10.
For this I'm ever grateful.

For many years, Raouf flew with us at Sugarbush, and
was a good friend to many of us in that group. He was
variously partners in a Janus, LS-4, and SZD among others.
Raouf sold the vario business in the late 70's to concentrate
on larger commercial markets, where he accomplished much,
building and selling a couple of companies.

Raouf gave up gliding for health reasons a few years
back, but stayed friends with many of us. It's hard
to believe that we were gossiping and reminiscing about
gliding and instrumentation at our health club just last
week. Life is too damn short.

We'll really miss Raouf.