Vashon Ranger R7

The Ranger R7 is the cheapest new certified-category-adjacent airplane with a real glass panel that anyone currently sells in the United States, and that is the entire point of it. $99,500 for the base Yellowstone package buys a two-seat, all-metal, high-wing airplane with a Dynon SkyView HDX panel, a two-axis autopilot, ADS-B In and Out and a Mode S transponder as standard equipment. Vashon's own framing is that the Ranger fills "the gap between aging, under-equipped certificated aircraft and newer but expensive Light Sport Aircraft", and on price that is not marketing — a comparably-equipped Bristell B23M runs around $365,000.

The mechanism behind the price is not a mystery and the company does not hide it: Vashon was founded by the same person who founded Dynon Avionics, and the avionics that would be the largest single line item on a comparable airplane are made eleven miles away in Woodinville, Washington by a sister company. The airframe is built at Vashon's own factory from 6061-T6 sheet on a CNC turret punch press, using pre-painted metal — one of the first small airplanes to do that — and final assembly happens at Paine Field. The engine is a Continental O-200-D from Mobile, Alabama. It is an unusually American airplane for this market segment and an unusually vertically-integrated one.

What a buyer gets for the money, in handbook figures rather than brochure ones: 114 KTAS at 5.8 gph at 7,500 ft, 833 fpm off a sea-level runway at gross on a standard day, a 489 ft ground roll, a 41 KIAS landing stall, and a 12,000 ft service ceiling. Fuel is 27.5 usable gallons across a wing group and a 2.5-gallon reserve tank, which is a little over four and a half hours.

What a buyer does not get is payload. 445 lb of useful load is the whole budget. Fill the tanks — 165 lb of 100LL — and 280 lb is left for two people and anything they are carrying, which is two 140 lb adults and nothing. That is the single hardest constraint on this airplane and it is a direct consequence of the 1,320 lb gross weight the current handbook is written to.

Which brings us to the thing that makes this page unusual to write.

Vashon sells one airframe in equipment packages rather than different airplanes, so the table below is a price list, not a performance table — every package flies on the figures in this page's frontmatter. Prices are the manufacturer's own, retrieved 2026-10-11.

Options quoted across packages: Rainier Design $2,500, Founders Design $9,500.

The base package is the story. On most new airplanes a glass panel, autopilot and ADS-B are the options that take a sub-$100,000 aircraft past $130,000. Here they are in the $99,500 airplane, and what the higher packages buy is mostly a certified Garmin navigator and the IFR-adjacent equipment above.

Everything in the frontmatter comes from POH revision 6, which is a genuinely good handbook by this catalog's standards: it publishes a complete cruise grid, temperature-indexed takeoff and climb tables, and an airspeed calibration table. Most light-sport pages in this catalog have to leave half their performance fields blank. This one has none blank.

The cruise triple is one row of one table. 7,500 ft density altitude, 2750 RPM, gross weight: 114 KTAS, 5.8 gph, 547 nm with no reserve. The stored range_nm of 501 nm is the handbook's own summary figure for that same condition with a 30-minute reserve held back. Both are the handbook's; the reserve figure is stored because it is the one a pilot can plan a leg on.

The rest of the grid, for anyone choosing a power setting:

Two things fall out of that table worth acting on. Flying low and fast is the expensive corner — 2,500 ft at 2750 RPM gives you three extra knots over 7,500 ft at the same RPM and costs 1.9 gph for them, cutting range by 123 nm. And the economy settings are barely slower: 7,500 ft at 2500 RPM gives up three knots for 25 nm more range and 0.4 gph less.

The manufacturer's specification page disagrees with the handbook and the handbook is used. The website lists "Max Cruise Speed 117 KCAS", which is the handbook's top speed (117 KIAS) relabeled as cruise; the handbook's actual cruise is 101 KIAS. It also lists a 315 ft takeoff and 475 ft landing distance that match no published condition at gross weight. The full comparison is in raw/mfr/vashon-ranger-r7-site-2026-10-11.md.

Temperature matters more than usual on takeoff, because the airplane has 100 horsepower. At sea level and gross weight the distance to clear fifty feet runs from 439 ft at 0 °F to 1,636 ft at 100 °F — a 3.7× spread across the handbook's own table. The stored 1,191 ft is the 60 °F row. On a hot day at a short strip, read the table rather than the summary.

445 lb of useful load, 165 lb of fuel if you fill it:

This is a one-person cross-country airplane and a two-person local one, and the stored mission scores say so: 6 for cross-country, 9 for local flying. The baggage compartment takes 100 lb and 23.9 cubic feet to the top of the seatbacks, and both seats fold forward ninety degrees — Vashon markets sleeping in it, which is a real use for a 445 lb budget as long as only one person came.

If the announced 1,450 lb gross weight arrives with the ~570 lb useful load, every row above gains 125 lb and the airplane becomes a genuine two-adult tourer. That is the single thing most worth watching about this type.

Flight training is a 9, and this airplane was designed for it. All-metal construction with no fabric or composite to repair, a 46.7-inch cabin wider than most four-seat certified airplanes, adjustable rudder pedals, 600-6 tires, five-point restraints for both seats, a 41 KIAS landing stall, angle-of-attack with audible cues, and a landing gear Vashon describes as designed "to handle your good landings, your bad ones, student pilots, unpaved runways". Operating cost lands near $148/hr all-in at 100 hours a year on the model below, on 5.8 gph. For a flight school replacing tired 152s, the economics are the pitch and the glass panel means a student trains on what they will fly later.

Local flying is a 9 for the same reasons plus the view: a strut-less cantilevered high wing and a large windscreen, which is a better sightseeing cockpit than anything with a strut in the way.

Cross-country is a 6. 114 KTAS and 4.7 hours of fuel is real capability, and the payload makes it a solo capability. The autopilot and synthetic vision are standard, which is more than most light-sport airplanes offer for a long leg.

Business travel is a 3 and backcountry a 4. No IFR approval today (see above) rules out the first. For the second: the short-field numbers are genuinely good — a 284 ft landing roll — and Vashon mentions unpaved runways, but this is a nosewheel airplane with modest tires and no STOL kit, so it is a good grass-strip airplane rather than a bush airplane.

Aerobatics is a 1 and that is a limitation, not an opinion. POH Section 2.6: aerobatics prohibited, intentional spins prohibited, flight with doors removed prohibited. Limit load factors +4.0 / −2.0 g.

The panel is the reason this airplane exists at the price it does, and it is also the thing to understand before buying one.

Every Ranger ships with a fully integrated Dynon SkyView HDX system: primary flight display with synthetic vision and angle of attack, a complete two-axis autopilot with flight director, VNAV and altitude pre-select, engine monitoring with all EGTs and CHTs plus lean assist and a fuel computer, 2020-compliant ADS-B Out with a Mode S transponder, ADS-B In traffic and weather, mapping and flight planning, COM radio and a two-place stereo intercom. The electrical system runs on AFS electronic circuit breakers controlled through the EFIS, from Dynon's Advanced Flight Systems division.

That is a non-certified avionics suite, and the trade is deliberate. Dynon SkyView is approved for light-sport and experimental aircraft; it is not a TSO'd certified panel, which is a large part of why it costs what it does. For a light-sport airplane that is the correct choice and the capability is at or above what a certified panel of similar price offers. It does mean the airplane's avionics are tied to one vendor's ecosystem — and to a company under common founding with the airframer, which is both why the integration is good and a concentration a buyer should be aware of.

The Cascade package adds a certified Garmin GTN 650Xi navigator with a PS Engineering audio panel, which is the IFR-capable box and the reason that package exists. Software for the Dynon side is updated through Vashon's own support site, which publishes software updates and service bulletins publicly.

Parts: good. Mechanics: common. Both ratings are higher than this catalog usually gives a low-volume type, and for specific reasons.

The engine is a Continental O-200-D — the same basic engine as a Cessna 150, seventy years of production behind it, parts and overhaul shops everywhere. The maintenance manual gives a recommended TBO of 2,000 hours or 12 years, and the calendar limit is the one that will bite a private owner: an airplane flying 80 hours a year reaches twelve years with 960 hours on the engine, so the real reserve per flight hour is higher than the hourly arithmetic suggests.

The airframe is 6061-T6 aluminium, described by Vashon as inherently corrosion resistant, in a conventional monocoque with no fabric and no composite structure — which is the easiest kind of airframe to find someone to repair. Vashon publishes its maintenance manual, POH, checklists and service bulletins openly on its website, with no login. That is rarer than it should be and it materially lowers the risk of owning a low-volume type.

Two items a prebuy should cover that are specific to this airplane:

The EarthX LiFePO4 battery (ETX680C) has an eight-year life expectancy per the POH. That is a scheduled replacement a lead-acid airplane does not have in the same form, and lithium installations still draw questions from some underwriters — ask about it when quoting insurance, not after.

The fuel pressure limitation changes at serial 10236. POH Section 2.8 marks the fuel pressure limits "NOT APPLICABLE FOR S/N 10236 AND ON", so there is a serial break in the fuel system. Establish which side of it an airframe falls on and make sure the documentation matches.

The engine_overhaul_cost_usd of $35,000 comes from reference/engine-overhaul-pricing.md and is confidence B in that document — positioned within the four-cylinder band by displacement rather than anchored on a quote, and the O-200 is explicitly on its "not yet sourced" list. Real-world O-200 overhauls are commonly quoted well below it, so the cost figures on this page are more likely high than low. Worth a real quote.

There is no used market to quote yet, and the reason is partly the new price. No used Ranger R7 was found offered on 2026-10-11. A type that has been in production for seven years in low volume, whose maker sells new from $99,500, has little room for a resale market to open underneath it.

What that means for a buyer is worth stating plainly: you will probably be buying new, from the factory, at list. There is no comparables-based negotiation available and no third-party price guide covers the type.

What should hold value well: an all-metal airframe with no fabric to recover and no composite to delaminate, an engine with universal parts support, a still-trading manufacturer eleven miles from its avionics supplier, and openly published documentation.

What to watch: the announced MOSAIC gross-weight increase will split the fleet. If a 1,450 lb airplane with 570 lb of useful load becomes the standard product and already-delivered 1,320 lb airframes cannot be brought up to it — the banner lists reinforced landing gear and strengthened structure, which does not read as paperwork — then pre-upgrade aircraft become the lesser airplane in a small market. Establish before buying which side of that line an airframe sits on, and whether an upgrade path exists.

No airworthiness directives are known against this type, with the asterisk that applies to every light-sport aircraft: an S-LSA is not certificated under Part 23, so the FAA does not issue ADs against it. The equivalent mechanism is the manufacturer's own safety directives and service bulletins, and an S-LSA owner is required to comply with those to keep the airplane airworthy — a stricter arrangement than it sounds, because the factory can mandate work with no FAA process in between.

Vashon publishes service letters and bulletins openly at vashonaircraft.com/service-bulletins.php. Get the full compliance record for the specific serial number at prebuy and check it against that list rather than the seller's summary.

With production running only since about 2018 in small numbers, there is no owner community large enough to have surfaced this type's pattern faults. Early owners are the ones finding them, and that is a real if unquantifiable risk — offset here by the factory still being in business, local, and publishing its documentation.

This should be one of the cheaper airplanes in the catalog to insure, and the $2,200 hull figure reflects that rather than a binder on file — no Ranger policy is on record, so this is extrapolated from the light-sport band in reference/insurance-costs.md at the low end.

Three things work in the owner's favour: a hull value around $100,000 rather than $300,000+, fixed tricycle gear with nothing to retract and no gear-up claim to make, and a 41 KIAS landing stall with angle-of-attack warning, which is the profile underwriters price well.

Two things to raise before you are quoted: the lithium battery, which some carriers still ask about, and training use if that is the plan — a school operation is a different rating basis entirely and the premium will reflect student hours rather than private ones.

Quote it through an agency that writes light sport specifically.