Our plane was sold at the start of August 2023. All of the details were handled by the capable sales team at LifeStyle Aviation. They are the people we bought the plane from, and they were incredibly helpful throughout the process.
A few years out from the factory, planes are all unique. Even two identical Cessna 172s delivered with the same equipment to a flight school, a few years later will have a different number of hours, different problems will be repaired on each plane, and so on. So a plane more than a decade old has no brothers, only cousins.
But N972RD really has no cousins.
The plane is a 2007 Diamond Twinstar (DA42). The two Centurion engines burn 10.8 gallons of JetA per hour, spinning three-bladed MT composite propellers, managed by a Garmin G1000 avionics suite.
We purchased it in March 2016 and has been flown by one pilot for the last 1,100 hours. It is for sale and we will stop flying it on September 15, 2023. New engines are waiting for it in the shop in Fort Worth, so it will be delivered with zero-time engines.
Five months after taking delivery we flew it back to the factory in London, Ontario where they made major upgrades. Then, after collecting it in December 2016, we continued to make a number of improvements. Features you would not expect in a 2007 Twinstar:
Avionics
• The Garmin GFC-700 autopilot, which for us was a new autopilot, replacing the KAP140. This upgrade is a lot of work since it requires replacing the servos, which requires work on the composite structure of the airframe. It cannot be done anywhere other than the factory. While it is nice to have a fully digital autopilot with faster servos, the key safety feature is that it provides a constant-airspeed climb (via the FLC button), so you can climb to altitude without risking a stall. It also provides a Flight Director integrated into the G1000 display so that you can see what the autopilot intends to do before you engage it. (We had a KAP140 autopilot in our single engine DA40 and during ten years of ownership replaced the main trim servo three times.)
• WAAS radios for the GPS receivers. This upgrade is no longer possible, even at the factory (they said they would start a waiting list for owners that wanted it, but as far as I know they have not completed any upgrades in the past few years and there are people on the waiting list. Be very careful if you are shopping for a DA42 and WAAS is not listed.
• Synthetic Vision for the G1000.
• ADS-B in and out, via Garmin’s GTX 345 transponder.
Interior
• Reclining seats in the front, a huge improvement for long flights. These were not standard on the 2007 model. At the same time we had a new interior installed, critical since it spent some time as a flight school plane. It had seen some long cross country flights and use by people not invested in keeping the leather nice.
• Installation of powered headset ports. This is a feature that we saw constantly in the Cirrus line of planes and didn’t understand why Diamond hadn’t added them. (They did have tip-powered headsets when they first started selling the Diamondstar, but no one used that style headset and the standard was not widely adopted.) Since then, Diamond has started to put LEMO plugs into their newer planes.
• Powered USB ports, one by the pilot’s left knee, one in the instrument panel, and two in the luggage area perfect for powering devices the rear seat passengers are using.
• Removal of the right seat’s control stick, allowing the right seat passenger to work on a laptop during long flights. (Obviously aided by the USB power port in the instrument panel right in front of the co-pilot’s seat.)
Airframe
• If you buy a brand new DA42-VI or a DA62, you will get much better brakes by Beringer. Since we were operating out of some short fields, sometimes in poor weather, it made sense to upgrade our brakes. To our knowledge, there is no other 2007 DA42 that has been retrofitted.
• In April of 2022 we added inspection ports to check the pushrod rollers. It does not appear to be a requirement yet, which is odd because it seems like a safety issue.
• XeVision makes the HID (High Intensity Discharge) lights for the DA42. Recently they started making a higher power ballast (50 watts instead of the stock 35 watts that Diamond installs). It produces 65% more lumens output. The HID bulbs do degrade over time. Ours were replaced in June 2023.
There is no damage history and the logbooks are complete. (There are complete scans of all of the logbook entries, although they are in small, separate graphic files, which might not be as simple to look through as the actual logs.)
Some of the photos show the current stripes, which are yellow and blue. The numbers are still in the style of the old stripes, which were light blue and dark blue.
The plane has been cared for by excellent mechanics. It has always been serviced at Diamond Service Centers, except in the rare instances when we have been AOG at an airport without one (a tiny wire broke on the starter in Cleveland KBKL, for instance, and we had a flat tire over in Burbank KBUR). Although David Seastead (currently working with Premier in Fort Worth, Texas) has been responsible for the plane since we took ownership, we have also had Glenn Lawler at SouthTec Aviation do two annuals, one when we purchased it and one when we had an ECU replaced. Galvin Flying at KBFI Boeing Field, Seattle, Washington has done some good work on the plane. All three of those shops have very deep Diamond Aircraft knowledge.
The annual is fresh as of June 1 2023.
Engines
Photo credit: David Seastead
The plane will be dropped at the Premiere Aircraft Service hangar in Fort Worth, Texas on September 15th. The engines are paid for and are waiting to be installed. Continental has a wait time of several months for new engines. CD-135 engines have a 2,300 hour TBR. The broker can probably answer any more technical questions than that, since I am not very mechanically inclined.
Flying Summers Brothers 