Box Canyon Crash Kills Three Aboard

ANN has been tracking reports of a DA42 crash for a few days but due to the vagaries of foreign translation and attendant media issues, we have only now confirmed that a special purpose Diamond DA42 Twin-engine aircraft went down in Romania last Wednesday. It is the first known fatal accident involving Diamond's innovative diesel-powered twin, though the cause of the accident appears to be condition/terrain-related rather than airframe-related, as the aircraft was found downed in a box canyon.

The aircraft was a Diamond-owned DA42 MPP (pictured above and below), a special purpose camera, sensor and observation platform that features a number of modifications to the basic DA42 design.

The aircraft (registered OE-FCD) went down September 26th, with loss of three people, the only ones on board. The 2 Austrians and one Romanian aboard were involved in a demonstration flight to perform low-level survey operations in Romania's Carpathian Mountains. While the investigation is currently underway, there are no initial reports of mechanical malfunction and no emergency communications were reported prior to the accident. The aircraft went down in a heavily wooded area, in a box canyon.

Diamond describes the MPP as a specially designed platform for carrying multi-functional aerial sensor equipment. "It combines the advantage of extremely low operating costs with the specialized requirements of sensor operators. The investment in a multi-purpose platform pays for itself through the fuel savings alone. The fully equipped DA42 MPP can operate in all weather conditions and at a wide range of speeds, from a minimum of 75 kts to a maximum of 152 kts (IAS). In monitoring mode the aircraft can fly for up to 12.5 hours without refueling. The maximum range at 50% power setting is more than 1350 nm."

The DA42 MPP was specifically developed to carry the following mission equipment:

• Large format, digital frame cameras
• Panchromatic and multi-spectral line scanners
• Hyper-spectral line scanners
• Laser scanners
• Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)
• Gyro-stabilized cameras for high-definition TV
• Gyro-stabilized multi-sensor cameras for law enforcement and environmental surveillance

FMI: www.diamondair.com, www.diamond-air.at