Every legend needs an author, and Airwolf's is a monster. Dr. Charles Henry Moffet — a British scientist whose brilliance kept buying him forgiveness for everything else — designed and built the billion-dollar prototype for the F.I.R.M., with Vietnam veteran Stringfellow Hawke among his test pilots. Then, at the official demonstration in the California desert, Moffet turned his creation's guns on the audience: killing the skeptical Senator Dietz, wounding a dozen others, and half-blinding deputy director Archangel — before flying Airwolf to Libya and offering her services to the highest bidder for cruelty.
The pilot movie catalogs his exile's atrocities almost casually: a French Mirage downed, an American destroyer sunk with all hands, and — when he discovered that the dancer Gabrielle was a F.I.R.M. agent sent to find him — a woman he left staked out in the desert to die. She was the woman Stringfellow Hawke loved. Hawke recovered Airwolf, found Gabrielle too late, and hunted Moffet down across the dunes, killing the creator with his own creation.
Dead, Moffet turns out to be the series' most persistent villain. He had destroyed Airwolf's plans, making the prototype irreplaceable — the very fact that lets Hawke dictate terms to the government. And he left a logic bomb sleeping in the Lady's computers, which wakes in Season 2's 'Moffett's Ghost' to seize the aircraft from beyond the grave. One appearance in the flesh, one as a recording — and a shadow over all seventy-nine episodes.
A note for the pedantic: the character is Moffet; the sequel episode's title spells it 'Moffett'. The error was Universal's title department, and fandom has argued about it ever since.