RANS S-21 Outbound

The S-21 Outbound is the big one: all-aluminium, side-by-side, high-wing, up to 180 horsepower, and in amateur-built form a 1,800 lb gross weight with 800 lb of useful load. That last figure is 36% more payload than anything else RANS makes, and it is why the airplane exists.

It is also the one where the paperwork changes the airplane more than the engine does, and that is the thing to understand before anything else.

RANS sells the same airframe three ways — as a kit, as a factory S-LSA, and through a builder-assist program as E-AB. The structure is identical. The weights are not:

320 pounds is not a two-seat airplane. One 180 lb pilot and 23 gallons of the 44.9 it can hold, and nothing else — no passenger, no baggage. The light-sport gross limit, not the structure, is doing that, and it costs this airframe 480 lb.

So this page describes the amateur-built configuration, and category is experimental rather than lsa. That is a deliberate call: the catalog stores one configuration per page, RANS lists the kit first on its own product page, and the E-AB is the only version whose numbers describe a usable two-seater. The S-LSA is a real product with real prices and it is in the Variants table — but anyone drawn to the S-21 by its load-carrying is looking at the 1,800 lb airplane.

On the rest of the figures: 135 KTAS, Vne 187 knots, a 325-foot takeoff roll, a 43-knot clean stall, 44.9 gallons of fuel, 180 lb of baggage capacity, and 5 hours of endurance plus a half-hour reserve. It is faster than every other RANS, carries far more, and lands nearly as short as the fabric models.

Why this page exists separately. Until 2026-10-12 the S-21 shared one page with the S-6, S-7, S-19 and S-20 under the name "RANS S-Series" — a 7.0× price spread and one set of specifications standing in for five airplanes, of which this is the largest and most powerful. See docs/LSA-CATEGORY-GAP.md.

Three engines, two certification baskets. Every figure below is from RANS's own per-engine spec sheets.

Both S-LSA prices are base figures and exclude avionics; the 916iS also excludes the AirMaster propeller. Gross weights are 1,800 lb E-AB and 1,320 lb S-LSA throughout, and fuel is 44.9 gallons on all three engines.

The Rotax 915iS is the quiet pick on the numbers. It is the lightest at 915 lb empty, which gives it the highest useful load of the three at 885 lb E-AB, and it reaches 18,000 feet against the Titan's 14,000 — 4,000 feet of turbocharged ceiling for 39 fewer horsepower. The Titan buys 10 mph and a simpler, cheaper, better-understood engine with parts on every field.

The 916iS sheet's useful loads are not recorded, because they do not reconcile. It gives 950 lb empty with 885 lb and 405 lb useful against 1,800 and 1,320 gross — both identities fail by exactly 35 lb, and the two useful-load figures are byte-identical to the 915iS sheet's. That is what a copy-paste between sheets looks like when the empty weight was updated and the useful loads were not. Either the empty weight is really 915 lb or the useful loads should read 850 and 370; the document gives no way to tell, and 35 lb is most of a passenger's baggage on an airplane with 405 lb to work with. Ask RANS.

RANS's product page also quotes an empty weight of 985 lb where the Titan spec sheet says 1,000 lb. The sheet is used, as the more specific document.

Siblings on their own pages: rans-s20-raven (fabric, side-by-side, convertible gear), rans-s7-courier (fabric, tandem) and rans-s19-venterra (low-wing aluminium, fast and light).

This airplane is the worst-documented of the four, and the gaps are large. RANS publishes, for every S-21 engine: cruise, Vne, two stall speeds, service ceiling, take-off roll, endurance, fuel capacity and weights. It publishes no fuel burn, no range, no rate of climb, no landing distance, and no dimensions beyond the wingspan and propeller diameter.

No fuel burn means no fuel line in the cost panel, and the page says so. All three sheets give "5 hrs" of endurance plus a half-hour reserve and no flow. It is tempting to divide: 44.9 gallons over 5 hours is about 9 gph. But that figure is plausible for a 180 hp Titan and high for a 141 hp Rotax at cruise, and the identical "5 hrs" on all three sheets reads like one round number covering the family rather than three measured ones. Deriving a burn from it would be inventing a measurement. The consequence is stated in the derived: block: the stored annual cost of $13,699 carries no fuel, and about $5,850 a year at 100 hours belongs on top of it.

No rate of climb is a strange omission for a 180 hp airplane at 1,800 lb, and there is no way around it from the published material.

No length means the hangar figure falls back to a class band, since the cost model derives hangar rent from span × length. The wingspan is 28 feet, from the product page; nothing published gives the length, and it is not estimated from a sibling because the S-21 shares no fuselage with the fabric models.

Where the figures do exist, they are good. Both weight identities check on the Titan and 915iS sheets: 1,000 + 800 = 1,800 and 1,000 + 320 = 1,320. And everything is converted from mph — 155 mph TAS is 135 KTAS, 215 mph is 187 knots.

cruise_percent_bhp is deliberately blank. The sheets label the figure "Vc" with no power setting, except the 916iS which says "Vc at 80%". The house rule is explicit that an unverified 75 must not be written, so the setting behind the stored 135 KTAS is simply unknown.

800 lb of useful load in amateur-built form, 269 lb of fuel if filled:

And the same airplane as a factory S-LSA, with 320 lb to work with:

That contrast is the single most useful thing on this page. The two rows describe one airframe, and the only difference is which certificate it holds.

Endurance is 5 hours plus a half-hour reserve on 44.9 gallons, per RANS. There is no published range — see Performance Notes.

Back-country is a 9, the highest in this catalog's light-sport section. A 325-foot take-off roll at 1,800 lb gross, 800 lb of useful load, 180 lb of baggage capacity, 44.9 gallons of fuel and 180 horsepower. RANS's own line is "All metal, all purpose," and the ready-to-fly sheet lists 22x8.50-6 tundra tires and an 8-inch pneumatic tailwheel as standard equipment on the taildragger. This is a serious load-hauling bush airplane that happens to be available as a kit.

Cross-country is a 7 and would be higher with a published range. 135 knots and 44.9 gallons is a lot of reach; the absence of a fuel burn is what caps the score, because the page cannot honestly say how far it goes.

Cargo hauling is a 4, which for a two-seat airplane is high. 800 lb of useful load and 180 lb of rated baggage capacity genuinely moves things.

Training is a 3. 180 horsepower, a 43-knot clean stall, tundra tires and tailwheel gear on a 1,800 lb experimental airframe is not a primary trainer, and an E-AB airplane cannot be used for commercial flight instruction for hire at all. The S-LSA could be, and then its 320 lb useful load makes it one-person.

Aerobatics 1, business travel 3. No IFR, no aerobatic approval.

Parts: good. Mechanics: specialist. RANS has been in Hays, Kansas since the 1980s, sells parts directly, publishes assembly manuals, pre-flight inspection sheets, tool lists and a DIRECTIVES page, and the S-21 is a current high-production model rather than a wind-down like the rans-s19-venterra.

The engine choice changes the maintenance picture more than anything else on this airplane.

The Titan IOX-340 is a Continental-built, fuel-injected, 180 hp Lycoming-form four-cylinder with dual LightSpeed electronic ignition, roller lifters, a Dynafocal 1 mount and 14 mm plugs. It runs on 100LL, turns a propeller directly with no gearbox, and any A&P in the country can work on it. The stored overhaul figure of $35,000 is from reference/engine-overhaul-pricing.md's four-cylinder band — and the Titan IOX-340 is not individually sourced there, so treat the resulting $17.50/hr reserve as a class estimate rather than a quote. Getting a real number is a follow-up.

The Rotax 915iS and 916iS are geared, liquid-cooled, turbocharged and intercooled, with redundant electronic fuel injection and ignition and an engine management system. They run on 91-octane auto fuel, reach 18,000 feet, and the 916iS sheet states a 2,000-hour TBO. They also need Rotax-specific training, a gearbox with its own inspection schedule, and calendar-driven rubber replacement that bites a low-utilisation owner before the hour limit does.

The airframe is all-aluminium, which is a different repair discipline from the fabric models — and a different prebuy. Crate weights on RANS's own shipping list give a sense of the scale: a 575 lb wing crate, a 450 lb fuselage crate and a 375 lb fuselage tube crate.

Prebuy specifics: build log and any technical-counsellor records; weigh it, because RANS marks its weights "approximately" and this airplane's whole appeal is useful load; engine total time with the ignition and injection history for a Titan or the gearbox and rubber history for a Rotax; corrosion inside the wings and fuselage; tundra tire and tailwheel condition; and the logs read for groundloop and prop-strike repair.

No used figures are stored. Few have changed hands since 2017 and the old combined page's $25,000–$175,000 band described five airplanes.

The two anchors that do exist are RANS's own factory S-LSA prices: $228,000 with the Titan 340 and $235,000 with the Rotax 916iS, both base and both excluding avionics — and on a Garmin digital panel that exclusion is a large number. They are not stored as price_new_usd because they describe the 1,320 lb S-LSA, not the 1,800 lb amateur-built airplane this page's weights come from, and mixing configurations in one row is the error the house rules name explicitly.

What drives value: builder quality, which engine, whether it is E-AB or S-LSA, panel, and gear configuration. Note that the E-AB and S-LSA are not interchangeable on resale — the S-LSA can be flown by a sport pilot and used for instruction, the E-AB cannot, and the E-AB carries 480 lb more load. Different buyers entirely.

An amateur-built S-21 holds an experimental airworthiness certificate and the FAA issues no airworthiness directives against experimental aircraft. A factory S-LSA S-21 is governed by RANS's own safety directives and service bulletins, which an owner must comply with to keep the airplane airworthy — the manufacturer can mandate work with no FAA process in between. RANS publishes a DIRECTIVES page; get the compliance record for the airframe and check it there.

The builder is the largest variable, and on an all-metal airframe assembled with pulled rivets the workmanship questions — hole alignment, edge distance, rivet selection — are the kind that hide. A build log and evidence of inspection during construction are worth more here than on a Courier whose frames arrived welded.

First kits shipped around 2017, so the fleet is young and small and there is not yet an owner community large enough to have surfaced pattern faults. Early builders are finding them.

$3,200 is extrapolated from the light-sport band in reference/insurance-costs.md and pushed well up it. No RANS binder is on file, and this is the hardest of the four RANS models to place.

Four things push it: 180 horsepower on a two-seat experimental airframe; tailwheel gear with tundra tires, which is where the claims are; a hull value that on a factory S-LSA is north of $228,000 before avionics; and amateur-built status, which some carriers decline outright for a pilot with no time in type.

A 1,800 lb E-AB at 180 hp is also outside the shape most light-sport underwriters price routinely, so expect to be quoted as an experimental load-hauler rather than as a light-sport trainer. Go to an agency that writes experimental aircraft specifically, and expect tailwheel and type-time requirements as conditions.