What Makes the DA62 the SAFEST Twin-Engine Aircraft? | DIAMOND AIRCRAFT SAFETY SPECS

so we want to dive directly into the safety characteristics of the diamond da 62 and to do that you first have to understand the history of how they design diamonds in general it all started just in the late 90s as they were preparing to build diamonds first clean sheet design and the owner of the company Christian Drees said I want the world's safest most efficient four-place aircraft and they sat down with a clean sheet of paper to design that to do that they needed to look back in history to see what caused accidents they came up with a big category bucket list of things like stall spins fires slow flight loss of control crosswinds occupant protection ideas and devices essentially they came up with the things that made aircraft unsafe and then as engineers sat down to design what could they do in each one of those instances to create something that mode lemonade or mitigate or reduce that particular problem first thing you need to do is get rid of spins that was the obvious thing if you could get rid of spins you could get rid of a lot of accidents Diamond chose to build a long wing that means the stall starts at the base and works its way out to the tips if the tips never really quit flying you just end up in a slow descent leaf type fall configuration for a stall if you never lose control if a wing never drops guess what never happens you never get a spin after almost 20 years you will work your tail off trying to find an accident as the word spin in it in any of the NTSB database now let's talk about fuel containment the way the diamond engineers approach the problem of fuel containment was dingy Gnaeus they figured out that if they could hide the fuel in the wing and protect it that in an accident if it didn't get out they could have an accident people could step out of the plane and there would be no fire and everything would be fine the first thing that they did is they said we have to build a protected space in the wing so most airplanes have one spar they decided to build two spars and in the diamond world those spars are made out of composite material their high beams shaped their carbon cap their foam filled and wrapped their outrageously strong and one spar would be more than enough to certify the airplane but they put too strictly for the purpose of creating that protected space in that space they put rounded crushable aluminum fuel cells that in an accident something has to forget through them front skin through the spar and through the actual tank before it gets to the fuel but they didn't stop there they also got rid of all the rubber hoses replacing them with the braided lines they minimize the number of fuel lines that would be in the cabin and the end result of this when it comes to fuel and fires and fuel containment after almost 20 years you will be perfectly hard-pressed to find an accident that mentions a fire of any sort in a diamond aircraft so good job guys because that one design choice was huge the next thing was control system the diamond control system is unique it's built with push rods instead of cables and pulleys what's the difference cables and pulleys are cheap easy to build and they're typical of all of our classic planes designed in the 50s that we know and love but they give a sloppy feel they kind of disconnect it on a crosswind landing or in tough windy conditions it's not unusual to be manhandling an old plane like this in a diamond aircraft not at all those push rods that control the ailerons and elevators are tightly coupled that stick in your hand is a direct feel of exactly what's going on with those control surfaces and the end result is not only a fabulous flying airplane with a wonderful feel but in tough conditions where you need that absolute control you've got long moment arm out on the ailerons and you have total control from a stick through the push rods to those surfaces so how does that affect safety one of the large safety buckets that planes deal with is what's called the loss of control bucket I call them buckets a loss of control is any kind of activity where it could be a crosswind a slow flight any time that the pilot can't fully control the airplane diamonds attempt to redesign control systems so that they wouldn't have that problem was wildly successful when you look through any of the accidents that have happened in the last roughly 20 years you'll find very little mention of loss of control in any of these accidents so pushrods major win for Diamond on creating not only safer but great flying airplanes slow flight is the next thing if an aircraft can handle slow fly better than other airplanes it means that when you're maybe in a base turn and you get a little slow slower than you should be and you make that turn a little too sharp and increase those G's if that wing doesn't give up the ghost and want to drop out from underneath you or maybe one of the wings do that so that you end up in a spin if it doesn't do that you've got a much safer flying wing that is the flying characteristics of a diamond wing they don't have sharp edges they don't tend to just drop out from underneath you again those tips are always flying so slow flight controls fuel containment all of these are keys and that spin resistance the next thing we talk about is in the area of crosswind control take that great diamond control system and combine it with an aero fuselage back to the tail it acts more like a butter knife cutting through crosswinds rather than a weather vane and you understand now why loss of control and tough wind conditions is not something you hardly see in the database of accidents with diamonds that's from their design goal that they had of reducing loss of control accidents all the diamond aircraft are designed with sleek fuselages that are teardrop shaped for speed most importantly they go back to narrow fuselage sections on the way back to the tail purpose for that is to make it more like a butter knife cutting through crosswinds rather than a weather vane you'll find that to be characteristic of all the diamonds the single 40s have cross wing components of 20 to 25 depending on whether it's gas or diesel the twins all have 25 and above crosswind components you'll enjoy flying these airplanes and crosswinds like you've never imagined it is so easy to land a diamond in tough challenging crosswind conditions because of the design the next thing we want to talk about is more passive oriented safety characteristics of the diamond specifically some of those are related to the fuselage as well the fuselage is designed completely on the 62 out of carbon fiber this is the thing that is used for Formula One race cars and they specifically design it so that in a crash certain parts break and certain parts don't in fact the cabin of the da 62 is the classic diamond 26 G crash cage where it's all reinforced typically with additional elements of carbon fiber and Kevlar so that in an accident that egg that all the occupants are riding around in does not break the next thing they do that's unique in that realm is they put the seats as part of the frame so that none of them are on tracks going back and forth and just going to come out of the floor in an accident that's huge for when you have a terrible accident and those seats are part of the frame locked into place directly under the roll bar where they want to have you safest so that you don't have anything to hit and you are held into place and in fact there's an absorption block under each seat that holds the occupants down and in locked into place this has been a huge component of occupant protection safety in diamond aircraft you'll see diamond does extensive modern computerized and camera tracking detailed crash testing to see how these cabin designs fare in the worst of accidents another safety feature of the da 62 that unique - it is the unique landing gear why is that a safety feature first off the landing gear is over built it's huge and it's designed for even bigger aircraft but more importantly it's a trailing link landing system that's where the post that holds the airplane connects to a lever that has a shock absorber what is this all about this means when we go to land the airplane we don't have a spring gear that bounces us like this and it gets out of control you have an absorption system that simply allows you to stick directly to the runway it is amazing and it makes every landing a smooth one and the pilot looks great every time next I want to talk to you about di systems the diamond da 62 is a flight into known icing certified airplanes sometimes referred to as feekiee how do you get fakie certification first and foremost you have a complete system that will last for an extensive period of time the 62 has the titanium leading edges with 800 microscopic holes per square inch where the glycol solution will leap out onto the wing and coat the entire wing surface top and bottom the prop spinners also have little Jets that put the glycol solution on the front of the props as they spin around next there's a spray bar to cover the windshield and then of course with the 62 the gear tucks up into that so we don't have to worry about the gear icing at all and of course all surfaces in the tail are part of the system as well you have two pumps three speeds and the system can last as long as three hours depending on what speed you have it running at the tank in the front is a nine gallon tank holding the glycol solution and so if you get into icing conditions in the da 62 you have multiple hours worth of protection but of course we always want to find a better place to fly if we can step out of that icing but you can fly with confidence that the 62 has more than enough de-icing capabilities of the right variety fully certified for you to take off and to fly through flight into known icing conditions and speaking about the passive safety system of the cabin where diamond places the seats of the occupants specifically end of the roll bars with crush blocks underneath them that makes it so that they have to get the pedals to come to the pilots it's really neat you jump in you press a lectric button and it comes to you or you adjust it perfectly to fit your leg length of course we couldn't have a safety video talking about the safety of a world class safest airplane without mentioning one of the major characteristics of the da 62 it has two engines both of those engines are electronically controlled and they actually have two computers on each engine and a computer between the computers that monitor the computers and of course each engine backs up the other engine computers on the other side this is an amazing amount of redundancy in a modern aircraft engine with total tracking and monitoring electronically of the systems of that engine throughout the flight the beauty of all of that is a pilot is I have nothing to do but if the system tells me there's something to be aware of I can take note otherwise I'm not involved in the management of the engine at all that in and of itself is a huge safety advantage I don't need to worry about lean of peak or rich of peak or running the props at the right speed I am completely enjoying the ride while the computers do all the work to provide me the optimum speeds and rpms and burn of those engines throughout the entire flight another safety feature of the engines is the fact that they are liquid cooled our traditional avgas engines are air-cooled what does that mean well they work great it's relatively low weight however shop cooling can be an issue if you're in a big-block engine and you're way up high and it's very cold and you start coming down a little bit too quickly it is possible that the metal can actually contract or expand in ways that can cause cracks in that engine that's what they call shock cooling in a liquid-cooled engine it's thermostatically-controlled I can be at 18,000 feet pull the throttle back to zero and literally point the airplane at the ground with the gear out and just come down and emergency descent never worrying about shock coolly this is a great thing to reduce pilot workload in the sense and various airspace but remember keeping that engine at that precise temperature will certainly be a longevity aspect for further safety one of my favorite features of a da 62 with the redundant engines is the fact that the engines don't burn what our traditional aircraft engines do this aircraft has 360 horsepower total and actually burns less than some single-engine aircraft that are in the similar class of GA for the number of seats any gas-powered turbocharged airplane is probably going to burn equal or more than this twin and every gas powered multi-engine aircraft is going to burn anywhere from 50 percent more to a hundred percent more of afghans led in it and is also more expensive and often times harder to find depending on what part of the world you're in what are the safety characteristics of operating the da 62 is how the multi engine performance operates in terms of speeds one of the coolest things I love about this airplane is in my role to take off if I'll just hold it on the runway for just a few more seconds I can get up to that speed and as soon as I take off I'm already at what's called blue line which means if I lose one of my engines in that moment I still have every bit of power and speed that I need to climb in this case all the way to 13,000 feet at full gross load that is unprecedented one of my favorite safety features of the diamond da 62 is the ability to have a digital radar in the nose of the aircraft this is not something that's offered on most general aviation single-engine aircraft but on this one it's a small lightweight digital unit lives right behind a special radome here on the front of the aircraft and it displays on the MFD in a sweet fashion like you're used to seeing a radar this gives real-time information to the pilot so that you know exactly what's up ahead incredibly valuable at night when you're flying through clouds or in embedded thunderstorms there are numerous accidents in the world where people thought they were not going to go into weather because their XM satellite weather was between five and ten minutes behind and displaying where it really was sometimes storms can be moving at 20 30 even 40 knots so having real-time display of where the weather is up ahead is a vital safety capability of any aircraft the da 62 has the full complement of the g1000 nxi system along with full ATSB digital autopilot synthetic vision terrain avoidance as well as something special called ESP ESP is a built in element of the system that if you get into an attitude which is getting out of control let's say a a bank that's too much or some type of climb that's too much the system will nudge the plane back into the safe zones this is all passive happens whether the act the autopilot is on or not and can control that airplane so that it doesn't ever get out of control so even though diamonds built in all of those safety control features that we talked about earlier you have even more built into the avionics that it will help to keep you always in control thanks for coming along to learn about the safety features the diamond da 62 we hope that you picked up some good information and some things that you didn't know about we hope to see you in our next video so make sure you subscribe and join us for the flight plan series where we'll be walking through more features of the diamond da 62 and other modern aircraft come along and join us you

Channel: LifeStyle Aviation

Views: 460,439

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Id: HXck2JK-9sk

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/WSBKingMackerel]

Great, now I gotta go buy an airplane.