Van's Offers A Quick Peek At The Bird That Got Everyone Excited At OSH21

Well... its real and it's flying. Despite a lack of detailed info, we now know that Van's Aircraft is flying the engineering protype of the RV-15, their first high-wing bird, announced at Oshkosh last year.

Over the weekend, Van's popped a very short video of a test flight of the bird on YouTube and set the sport aviation community on fire within minutes. The video shows N7357, registered just last May as an 'RV-8X' conducting a pretty short takeoff followed by nearly a minute of inflight beauty shots.

Van's is still NOT saying much, noting only that, "This airplane was built to evaluate and test the design, and what we've been learning from this engineering "tool" test airplane will result in refinements and changes that will appear in the final 'kit' aircraft design." A Van's rep also declared that they are not yet taking kit orders... "This is the engineering prototype, from which we develop the kit airplane. We will take orders once we know when kits can be delivered. That takes some time."

At Oshkosh 2021, Van's Vice President, Greg Hughes, explained that "...we had our ‘What's new and happening at Van's Aircraft’ forum, and we let the cat out of the bag, or opened the curtain a little bit, to tell people about the RV-15, which is the next model coming from Van's Aircraft. What we have announced to date is that it will be a high wing, all metal, backcountry capable airplane. The initial version will be a tailwheel with a tricycle version to follow. It will have a control stick, not a yoke, so those are some of the things we have said. We are super excited about it. Continuing, he said that, “I am really looking forward to building one, I can tell you that,” he adds. “It’s actually really unusual for Van's to announce anything before it’s completely done, so this is the first time we have done this,” he continues. Over the years, customers have been asking about a backcountry aircraft so the company decided to finally let them know that this is the direction they are heading in."

Van's has a forum, at Oshkosh on Tuesday, in which more extensive details are expected to be announced... we'll be there and let you know what we learn.

FMI: www.vansaircraft.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sHK-B230sY