The Aero Club of New England (ACONE) will present the Godfrey L. Cabot Award to Richard VanGrunsven, Founder and CEO of Van’s Aircraft, on Friday, June 6, at the Harvard Club in Boston. The Godfrey L. Cabot Award will be presented to VanGrunsven for his unique achievement in aviation changing homebuilding into a significant segment […]
Van's Aircraft
Production of fly-away RV-12s to continue
Production of fly-away S-LSA RV-12 will continue in 2014, according to Dick VanGrunsven, founder of Van’s Aircraft, Inc. and Wally Anderson, head of Synergy Air. The first batch of fly-away RVs was built in Synergy Air’s Eugene, Ore., facility during 2013. They sold almost immediately, according to company officials. By the start of 2014, 14 aircraft […]
New Garmin radios debut in Van’s RV-12
Garmin’s Team-X has been quietly developing a new unit to replace the SL-40. Officials at Van’s Aircraft reveal they’ve been testing the new GTR200 comm radio/intercom in an RV-12 for a couple months and have decided to make the GTR200 the standard radio both both the kit-built and factory-built RV-12. “It has Garmin’s usual excellent […]
Van’s RV-14 lands in Florida
Van’s newest airplane, the RV-14, has landed in Florida for the first time. “It has come to our attention that isolated pockets of civilization might exist in the far reaches of the American continent, way out east of Oshkosh,” Van’s officials said. “On the theory that some of those folks might be interested in our […]
8,000th Van’s takes flight
On Feb. 4, Stephen Watson of Santa Clarita, Calif., took the first flight in his RV-7A, becoming the 8,000th completed RV reported to Van’s Aircraft. Watson works for the Jet Propulsion Labs in California, and chose the RV-7A despite the fact that the airplane is powered by a piston engine, with no rocket or jet […]
Van’s unveils fully built RV-12
Honestly, I didn’t expect much LSA news at AOPA’s Aviation Summit in Palm Springs. Despite several LSA on display, including Kitfox, Evektor, Flight Design, Arion, Jabiru, SportCruiser, Skycatcher, and CubCrafters, the AOPA event is not a common place for LSA announcements. Certainly I didn’t expect the world’s largest supplier of kit aircraft to offer a […]
Fly away in an RV-12
Van’s Aircraft has launched a new program to build completed, fly-away, RV-12s. Van’s has inked a working agreement with Synergy Air of Eugene, Ore., to manufacture the airplanes in the U.S.A. Nearly 200 kit-built RV-12s have been completed and flown as E-LSA and E-AB aircraft, accumulating thousands of hours. Production S-LSA RV-12s will include the […]
Van’s to build ‘fly-away’ RV-12s
Van’s Aircraft is tentatively entering the OEM market with an initial run of 12 deluxe copies of its RV-12 LSA. According to a podcast interview with AVweb at AOPA Aviation Summit in Palm Springs, Calif., Van’s Aircraft founder and president Dick VanGrunsven said it was a market the company was thinking about when it launched […]
Greg Marlow’s dream machine: A go-places plane
There are many reasons people chose to build an airplane. Sometimes, it’s the challenge of the project, or an attempt to reduce the cost of flying. Other times it’s to build a dream machine to handle what would otherwise be a less-than-enjoyable commute. Greg Marlow from Kingsport, Tenn., falls into the last category. He is […]