Which Diamond Aircraft is BEST? | Comparing the DA62, DA50, DA42-VI, DA40NG & DA20

hi everybody my name is john armstrong with lifestyle aviation and we're here at oshkosh and i wanted to take a minute to give you a quick brief on the entire diamond family of aircraft [Music] many people don't realize how many aircraft diamond actually have designed built and flown and offered to the market these days so we're standing here in front of the diamond da20s this aircraft is nimble it is fun to fly it feels a little bit like strapping on a little fighter plane the stick control that we're going to tell you more about later is just magic it is spinnable it is fun you've got beautiful visibility out of the canopy it is a great airplane to learn to fly it gives you the feel and the feedback of how to land an airplane fly an airplane this is used extensively by flight training organizations for primary flight training and again if you learn to fly in a d820 you will absolutely know great stick and rudder skills and you'll have a blast doing it next i want to introduce you to the da40 the airplane that totally changed the 21st century christian dries challenged his engineering team to build from scratch the foundational aircraft that would be the world's safest most efficient airplane in the fourth place category and to build it in such a way as it would be the foundation and cornerstone for other designs to go with two engines and bigger cabins and work its way up the ladder that he already had completely visioned out before he started so the da40 to design it to be the world's safest and most efficient they first had to figure out what's wrong with airplanes that we can actually fix as engineers they went back through all the data of all the past to figure out what caused accidents in airplanes in their analysis they learned that stall spins fire and fuel containment loss of control which is things like crosswinds most of the designs of the 50s were out of aluminum they didn't have much occupant protection so in a crash people you know literally could get hurt by the airplane itself and then that nasty little problem that came out very obviously was seat tracks when you move the seat around it's just on tracks it can come out in a crash or it maybe doesn't even stick and you pull back like this and you cause an accident first thing they did at diamond was to build a beautiful wing a long wing so it takes longer to stall and at the tip they focused on what happens in a complete stall so diamonds have this flight characteristic which goes up it goes into a stall and it just kind of comes down like a leaf in a completely controllable fashion now why is that so important to the whole family because that wing is the same wing on every one of the airplanes after the da40 that i'm going to show you the next thing that was important to dig into was fires and fuel containment the first thing you do to help solve the fuel and fire containment problem is you use less fuel which was always already one of their primary objectives for the aircraft be efficient so the next thing you can do is use jet fuel which is less volatile you combine those two together with the specialized engineering that they did which was to build a wing that inside you have two spars one in the front one in the back one of them would be more than enough to certify the aircraft to fly but they spent the expense and the effort to put two so there would be a protected space in between them in that protected space they put these crushable aluminum cells and they got rid of all the rubber hoses and all used braided lines throughout the whole system by doing this they created an attempt to get rid of fires in airplanes forever this is not something you can easily go back to an older airplane design and modify it's a complete fresh idea well guess what after 20 years it worked you have a really difficult time finding even the word fire anywhere in any accident with a diamond involved at all that is magic imagine how much that one commitment to that idea has contributed to safety this aileron that i'm playing with right here is special very special first off it is large look how large it is it is made of composite it's not just aluminum folded with some rivets in it so it's mass balanced to match the other one it is connected to the control sticks with push rods there are no cables or pulleys in this aircraft at all it's all push rods so your control feel on that system is absolutely fantastic most importantly also is how this aileron is not only long but guess where it goes it goes all the way to the tip of the wing where is that last bit of control that you need it's out at the very tip in a stall spin situation the flap starts right here right connected to the aileron and you think it comes down and stops about right here but it doesn't take a look at this all the way to the fuselage is where this flap system actually comes to here i've got planes that i fly where the wings are shorter than the flaps on the da40 why is all of this important being able to go slow in an aircraft in complete control is what it's all about most accidents happen near the ground and take off or landing so if you perfect your controllability and slow flight and you make it completely controllable with those push rod control sticks and these long flaps and those fabulous ailerons then you can contribute significantly to minimizing loss of control accidents so the engineers at diamond started with the shape of the cabin as being part of the aerodynamic structure that defines the flight characteristics of course they built it as a big teardrop for speed and efficiency but then they brought it down to this narrow section here and that contributed very specially to how they wanted the plane to fly in crosswinds why if the wind's blowing from the cross guess what happens very little weather veining in this section here because it's rounded and it's small you look at most other aircraft designed of aluminum this section is at least double or triple this size right here why because structurally it has to be to hold the tail first we get rid of the weather veining here and then we stick the tail as far back as they possibly can if you measure from the front to the back of this aircraft and compare it to many others this is not a short coupled system what that means is my big big rudder back here has a lot of lever to control the stability this way next i want to introduce you to the diamond da42 so we just saw the da40 and what you do after you build that airplane and you perfect it you get it out of the market you simply change the undercarriage structure a little bit so that you can install two engines on either side you replace the fixed gear with this retractable gear system that has a trailing link landing system which we'll talk about in a minute and you tuck it up under the belly so now we've got an undercarriage that holds two engines but we're using exactly the same cabin as you just saw on the da40 that provides us the advantages of nose baggage up front plus the baggage in the back of course we have the air conditioning like we had on the single same system here same control systems same ailerons same wing but we're going from an aircraft that's a four place single engine to a four place twin we can add things like higher speed greater load tksd ice systems not only for the wings but also the props and that gives us the next level airplane in the family that you can step up to to go faster farther fly at night fly over water greater redundancy more safety and we already had the world's safest airplane so when diamonds sat down to design the 42 they knew they had a challenge light twins of the past had many problems first off they were flying gas old engines they had six levers to manage they wanted that to go away that part was easy because the fedex controlled engines that diamond provide they're just one lever so there's only two levers in a twin but the real problem with twins is what happens when you're flying on one engine and the ability to control that aircraft let's take a baron as an example it has 300 horsepower aside it's pretty shortly coupled there's not as much rudder back there is really needed fundamentally to control it in all circumstances and that can be a real handful in a one engine situation so diamond looked at all those problems came up with all the solutions number one we're going to make it so that when you lose one engine we're not losing so much power because they're more efficient so the impact is less number two the tail length and the size of the tail and that weather veining that we showed you with the smaller tail section in the back provides for greater control when you're flying on one engine three feathering of the engine when one goes out that's a manual job on a non-computerized old twin with those six levers with this one it's automatic they got rid of all the fundamental problems with light twins so i dare say this is the world's easiest twin to ever fly next i want to introduce you to the diamond da62 the da62 uses the austro ae330 that's a 180 horsepower version of the same engines we've been showing you on the da40 and the 42. so same technology same engines they boost it with software to give a little bit higher horsepower so that we can put a bigger cabin on it and we can get up to seven seats we have nose baggage up front and baggage in the way back the comfort and the size of this cabin make it totally unique in the light airplane category this is a fabulous business cruiser family suv it does so many things well but the most important thing to know about the 62 and all the diamonds is how easy to use they are we jump in we turn them on the engines have automated computer starts with push buttons they instantly start cold weather hot weather hot starts it just doesn't matter the engines on these airplanes are what make everything so magic all right let's go take a look at the d850 the da-50 brings a new engine into the diamond family this is the cd-300 it is a twin turbo charged jet fuel burning fedex controlled liquid cooled aircraft engine designed specially for this purpose the da-50 shares the same heavy-duty landing gear system retractable as on the da62 you'll notice the trailing link landing gear system in the back and also the large landing gear tires all the diamond twins do fabulous on grass or other uh unimproved surfaces so you can go anywhere you want cool thing about the d850 is you have the same cabin size as the 62 that we looked at so it's going to be set up to be up to a five place that's a two plus three configuration with cargo in the back a couple of special design features of the new flaps on the diamond d850 wing they made them slotted now so they actually operate at even slower speeds than they would otherwise for this weight category all the special characteristics of a diamond winger there with the special wingtip controls so you don't have the stall spin like we talked about before we encourage you to check out the entire diamond family figure out which one of the siblings actually fits your mission best call us at lifestyle aviation will help you figure out how to create that ideal aviation lifestyle [Music]

Channel: LifeStyle Aviation

Views: 149,975

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Id: _3SMF8u-I-k

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022