From the ground up the factory is purpose built and represents our investment in the kit plane and light sport industry. It is a place where many technologies work in concert to create aircraft from raw materials, either kits or fly away planes.
All the hard working employees at RANS take pride in making quality American products.
The amazing detail, quality and completeness of a RANS kit plane does not come without a serious investment and commitment to infrastructure. In our case we have a 58 thousand square foot factory with typically 50 plus people employed full time to make the kits happen.
Within our walls many different technologies are in constant process, since we actually build the planes from raw materials. Take a walk through with me to gain a detailed insight as to how a RANS aircraft comes into existence.
Welcome:
You will enter our lobby and office area through an airlock. Inside you will see our office staff ready to greet you and begin the tour. We ask you sign the register which places your current address on our mailing list.
From the lobby we enter the connecting hallway. The factory is actually two large buildings connected by the office complex. In the connecting hallway are about 30 to 35 recumbent and crankforward bikes. Also on the wall of the hallway is a map of the world and many colored stars and dots denote locations of dealers around the world. It is fun to look at this map and realize we have product flying on just every country that is free to fly.
As we walk down the hall we pass the shipping receiving dock. Our kits ship in sturdy wooden crates, that are
included in the price.
Some customers drop in and pick their kits up!
We now enter the North Shop, which houses a variety of processes. Our first stop is Packing. Kits are carefully packed and arranged on a “skid” which later is enclosed to become the crate. Depending on the plane some ship as one large box (S-7S), others like the Coyote and Airailes ship in two boxes. Our packing crew has experience packing thousands of planes and that shows in the fact kits arrive intact ready to start building.
