RANS S-7S Courier

The S-7 Courier is the tandem one, and that is the entire reason to choose it over its sibling. RANS's own tagline for it is "Tradition Re-imagined" — a fabric-and-steel-tube taildragger with the passenger behind the pilot, which is to say a Super Cub in everything but the badge, built from a kit RANS has been selling since 1985.

The number that defines it is the 30-inch cockpit width. The rans-s20-raven is the same airplane in almost every other respect — same Rotax 912 ULS, same 1,320 lb gross, same 732 lb empty weight, same 5.0 gph, same 26 gallons, same 110 mph cruise, same stalls — and has a 46.5-inch cockpit because it seats two side by side. Everything else between these two is detail. Pick the seating arrangement first; the rest follows.

What tandem buys: a narrower fuselage, which is why the Courier is the one you see on floats and skis and on strips where the wings are the wide part. What it costs: you cannot talk to your passenger face to face, a nervous first-timer sits somewhere you cannot reach, and instructing from the back seat is a different skill.

On the figures: 96 KTAS on 5.0 gph, 850 fpm, a 325-foot takeoff roll, a 29-knot stall with flaps, and 588 lb of useful load on a 732 lb empty weight. Baggage is 50 lb in 10 cubic feet, which is the one place the Raven clearly wins — it carries 80 lb in 21.2 cubic feet.

Why this page exists separately. Until 2026-10-12 the Courier shared one page with the S-6, S-19, S-20 and S-21 under the name "RANS S-Series", with a price band spanning 7.0x and a single set of specifications standing in for five different airplanes. See docs/LSA-CATEGORY-GAP.md.

The S-7S and S-7LS are the same aeroplane with different paperwork — a builder's experimental certificate versus a factory statement of compliance. That distinction drives insurance, who may legally maintain it, and resale, and it is covered under Maintenance and Insurance below.

Siblings on their own pages: rans-s20-raven (side-by-side, same construction), rans-s19-venterra (low-wing aluminium, faster) and rans-s21-outbound (all metal, up to 180 hp).

"No welding required" is a real claim worth repeating, because the S-7's fuselage and tail frames are welded 4130 steel — RANS does that welding at the factory and the builder does not need the skill or the jig. For a first-time builder that removes the single largest barrier to a steel-tube airplane.

The sheet is internally consistent, which is rarer than it should be. Three independent checks pass: 732 + 588 = 1,320 exactly; 26 gal ÷ 5.0 gph = 5.2 hours, matching the published endurance exactly; and 5.2 hours × 95.6 kt = 497 nm, matching the converted 572 statute miles. Cruise, burn, endurance and range are one coherent set rather than four numbers from four brochures.

Everything RANS publishes is in mph and statute miles, and the stored figures are converted — 110 mph is 96 KTAS, 572 miles is 497 nm. Storing 572 would have overstated range by 15%, which is the trap the research protocol names and the one found live on the Flight Design CT page a day earlier.

Where it differs from the Raven, and it is all small: 850 fpm against 900, a 325-foot takeoff roll against 300, an 8:1 glide against 8.5:1, and a 70°/sec roll rate against 80. The Raven's extra foot of wingspan and 5.6 more square feet of area account for most of it. None of these differences should decide a purchase; the cockpit width should.

Two figures are deliberately absent. The sheet gives ground rolls and no over-50-foot obstacle distances, and those are not estimated — the obstacle figure runs 1.4–2.2× the ground roll. And there is no best-glide speed, only the 8:1 ratio, which is about 4 nm of glide from 3,000 feet AGL. That is a draggy airplane by design: struts, fabric, big tires and 147 square feet of wing.

588 lb of useful load, 156 lb of fuel if filled, and only 50 lb of baggage allowance:

Like the Raven, this is not a payload-limited airplane — two adults, full baggage and full fuel fit simultaneously inside 1,320 lb, which the Bristell RG (472 lb useful) and the Vashon Ranger (445 lb) cannot do. The limit here is the 50 lb baggage allowance, not the scales: there is room on the weight sheet for far more than the compartment is rated to carry.

For a camping airplane that is a real constraint and the Raven's 80 lb in 21.2 cubic feet is the better answer.

Back-country is an 8 and local flying a 9. A 325-foot roll, a 29-knot stall with flaps, a tailwheel, and a fabric-over-steel-tube structure that can be patched in a hangar rather than sent to a composite shop. The narrow fuselage is an advantage in tight places and the tandem layout gives the pilot a centreline view, which is why this configuration has dominated bush flying for eighty years.

Surveying is a 7, higher than the Raven's 6, for the same reason: a centreline seat with unobstructed views either side is a better camera platform than a side-by-side cabin where the pilot sees one side well and the other through a passenger.

Training is a 5 and that is the honest number. Cheap to run and docile, but tailwheel-only means an endorsement before solo, and instructing from the rear seat of a tandem is a specialist skill with a smaller pool of instructors. A school teaching tailwheel transition could use one well; a school teaching ab initio should look at the Raven's trike build instead.

Cross-country is a 5. 96 knots and 5.2 hours is genuine range, and four hours in a 30-inch-wide tandem cockpit is its own kind of long.

Business travel 2, aerobatics 1. No IFR, +4/−2 g, spins not approved.

Substantially the same picture as the rans-s20-raven — same manufacturer, same construction, same engine — so the detail lives there. The three things specific to this airframe:

Tailwheel only. There is no trike option, unlike the Raven's convertible gear, so every S-7 is a tailwheel airplane for insurance, endorsement and groundloop-risk purposes.

Fabric age is the clock that matters. Ask when it was last recovered and with what. A recover is a four-figure job and an airplane with twenty-year-old fabric is a different purchase from one recovered last season, whatever the engine says.

The factory welds the frames, which helps a buyer too — a builder could not have got the fuselage geometry wrong, because they never built it. That narrows the range of things an amateur-built S-7 can have wrong with it compared with a kit where the builder welds.

Engine: Rotax 912 ULS, 2,000-hour TBO, $14,000 overhaul from reference/engine-overhaul-pricing.md at confidence A — anchored on published quotes rather than estimated, giving a $7.00/hr reserve. Rotax's calendar-driven rubber-replacement intervals bite a low-utilisation owner before the hour limit does.

No used-market figures are stored, for the reason given in validator_exempt: the old combined page's $25,000–$175,000 band described five airplanes and belongs to none of them. The finder shows this model without pricing rather than scoring it on the S-21's numbers.

What moves an S-7's value: builder quality, engine time against TBO and calendar, fabric age, panel, and whether it is an E-AB S-7S or a factory S-7LS — the latter commands a premium and is easier to insure and resell, because a buyer is not underwriting a stranger's workmanship.

RANS publishes a current KIT PRICING SHEET, which is the right anchor for a new build and a follow-up for this page.

An amateur-built S-7S holds an experimental certificate and the FAA issues no airworthiness directives against experimental aircraft. A factory S-7LS is governed by RANS's own safety directives and service bulletins, which an S-LSA 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 serial number at prebuy.

The builder is the biggest variable on any amateur-built airplane, and RANS marks its own weights "approximately". Weigh the airplane. A heavy build can cost 50–80 lb of that 588 lb useful load with nothing actually wrong.

Prebuy specifics: builder's log; weight and balance with its date; engine total time and last rubber replacement; fabric condition and recover date; tailwheel assembly and tailspring for wear; and the logs read for groundloop and prop-strike repair. A prop strike on a geared Rotax means a gearbox inspection, not just a propeller.

$2,200 is extrapolated from the light-sport band in reference/insurance-costs.md, slightly above the Raven's because every S-7 is a taildragger where a Raven may be a trike. No RANS binder is on file.

The drivers, in order: tailwheel time — expect an endorsement, dual minimums and possibly a named-pilot restriction on a low-time owner; amateur-built versus S-LSA, since some carriers decline an experimental airframe for a pilot with no time in type; and hull value, which on a kit airplane is whatever the build and panel came to rather than a book figure.

Quote it through an agency that writes experimental and tailwheel specifically.