Ryan Navion
1948 touring aircraft family by Ryan
The Ryan (originally North American) Navion is a single-engine, unpressurized, retractable gear, four-seat aircraft originally designed and built by North American Aviation in the 1940s. It was later built by Ryan Aeronautical Company and the Tubular Steel Corporation (TUSCO).
The Navion was envisioned as an aircraft that would perfectly match the expected postwar boom in civilian aviation. It was designed along the general lines of, and by the same company which produced the North American P-51 Mustang, and North American T-28 Trojan.
Design and development
The Navion was originally designed at the end of World War II by North American Aviation as the NA-143 (but produced under the NA-145 designation). North American built 1,109 Navions in 1946–47, initially selling them at a below cost US$3,995, which later increased to $6,100, although the actual cost of construction was $9,000. These included 83 L-17As for the US Army and National Guard.
Ryan Aeronautical Company acquired the design in the summer of 1947, launching production at its San Diego factory in 1948. Ryan built 1,240 Navions (powered by 205 hp (153 kW) Continental O-470 engines or 250 hp (190 kW) Lycoming O-435 engines), including 163 aircraft for the US armed forces, before production ended in 1951, with Ryan wanting to concentrate on defense production.
Production rights passed to the TUSCO corporation, which flew a prototype of a revised version, the Navion Rangemaster G, on 10 June 1960, and set up the Navion Aircraft Company to build it.
The public source identifies “Ryan Navion” as 1948 touring aircraft family by Ryan. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ryan, Navion and touring.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1279022. The Library of Congress control number is sh2005003744. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1947, 1948 and 1951.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ryan Navion” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.