Floyd Jerome Sweet, 91, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who from 1961 to 1976 was a Washington-based intelligence officer for NASA, died March 30 at Falcons Landing retirement home in Sterling. He had kidney cancer.

During World War II, Lt. Col. Sweet served in the Army Air Forces training fliers of assault gliders. After the war, he joined the newly formed Air Force and continued in the development and testing of military gliders. He also became involved in intelligence work before retiring in 1961.

He was a native of Elmira, N.Y., and a 1937 aeronautical engineering graduate of the University of Michigan.
A glider aficionado since boyhood, he was a founding editor of Soaring magazine in the 1950s. He was a former president of the Soaring Society of America and the Elmira-based National Soaring Museum, which elected him to the Soaring Hall of Fame and credited him with training more than 1,500 military glider pilots.

He also was a founding member of Little Falls Presbyterian Church in Arlington.

His first wife, Frances Peebles Sweet, to whom he was married 50 years, died in 1987.

Survivors include his wife of 12 years, Isabel Bonnett Sweet of Sterling; three children from the first marriage, F. Jerome Sweet Jr. of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Kittie S. Alexander of Burnsville, Minn., and William G. Sweet of Fairfax County; two stepsons, Donald Bonnett of Timonium and Mitchell Bonnett of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; a sister; eight grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.