Van's Aircraft RV-15
American light kit airplane
The Van's Aircraft RV-15 is an American amateur-built aircraft that is under development by Van's Aircraft of Aurora, Oregon. It was first publicly shown at the AirVenture airshow in July 2022. The aircraft is supplied as a kit for amateur construction, and as of July 2025 the company began accepting deposits for the initial sub kit, the RV-15 wing kit, with wing kit deliveries planned to start in December, 2025. The company announced a schedule on which it plans to accept orders for the remaining kits (tail, fuselage, finish, and firewall-forward kits) though summer, 2026.
Development
The RV-15 is the first high-wing design for the manufacturer, a company known for its low-wing aircraft. The design was developed based on input from customers. Development was started with a "pine pigeon" wooden mock-up.
The aircraft was designed by a 12-person engineering team starting in 2019. The design team included Van's chief engineer and past president Rian Johnson; Rob Heap, formerly of Scaled Composites and also Cessna; Brian Hickman formerly of Glasair Aviation and Axel Alvarez, a civilian graduate of the United States Naval Test Pilot School.
The prototype was constructed from computer assisted design parts utilizing matched-hole technology, with punch presses and computer numerical control machines working directly from the engineering design drawings.
“Van's Aircraft RV-15” enters the record as american light kit airplane. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Van's, Aircraft and RV-15 can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q113499627. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2022, 2025, 2026 and 2019.
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