Diamond announced two days ago that a DA42 Twin Start crashed in Romania during a demonstration flight to a potential customer, killing the pilot and two passengers. As always in such circumstances, I first want to say that my thoughts go to the relatives to the three victims.

The causes of this accident are obviously not known yet, and anything you could hear before the investigation report will be published will be theory out of nothing and rumors… Only the report will establish the facts, I have no comment to make before. This is particularly true in this case, because of the previous incident in Germany who started lot of discussions about the DA42.

An interesting fact here is that the anouncement mentions “The electrical engine and control management systems, as well as the measurement equipment on board allows for a very good evaluation of the progression of the flight up until the impact“.

As I already mentionned in an older post comparing FADEC to black-boxes, the FADEC records all engine parameters. Couple that with the track memory in the G1000 which equips all DA42, and you get a nearly full recording system. The only missing part is the cockpit voice recorder. The G1000 audio-panel includes some recording features, but only of radio-communications. The intercom is not recorded.

It will be very interesting to know how the recorded data will contribute to the investigations. Stay tuned on this blog for updates on this case.