The aircraft is a Van’s RV-7A belonging to Lennard Nichols and Jay Conlin from Alberta, Canada. They said, “First flight couldn’t have gone better! Aircraft flew hands off. Handled like an RV should!”

Van’s Aircraft was started in 1972 when a ‘skinny young engineer from a small town in Oregon’ began selling plans and parts for his self-designed single seat RV-3. That man was Richard VanGrunsven (hence the name ‘RV’).  Richard manufactured the parts in a workshop behind his house in the small town of Reedville, Oregon.

These days, Van’s has a 60,000 square foot facility on Aurora State Airport, Oregon and is an employee-owned company manufacturing several hundred complete aircraft kits a year.

RVs are flying in at least 45 different countries and kits have shipped to more than 60.

Completed RVs (as of 30 November 2021)

Not that long ago, back in 2017, December 4^th, the 10, 000^th RV flew, built and owned by David Porter. His aircraft was serial number 74311, a RV-7, and was the 1 662^nd RV-7 to fly.

STATS

“An interesting sidebar is that the shortest time taken to gain 1,000 flying RVs was from 6,000 to 7,000 in the 23 months leading up to October 2010,” said company officials.

“At that time, three new RVs flew every two days.”

No one is exactly sure when the 1,000^th RV flew, with the best guess around early 1994.

The 2,000 mark was passed in November 1998, 19 years ago.

The increase from 9,000 flying RVs to 10,000 took just 33 months or under 1,000 days.

Today, about one new RV airplane leaves the ground each day, and at current rates, that should take only about half as long as the first 10,000, which should be around the year 2040.

“We’re confident that Van’s will be there, and that plenty of RVs will still be delighting their owners, and taking new generations of builders into the sky,” said Dick VanGrunsven, founder and CEO.