barbouze
17th May 2016, 10:17
Hello everyone,
I operate a BE58 in a small mountainous tropical island. I currently do mainly aerial survey and private flights.
With my partners, we are looking to develop our business with Public transport by focusing on scenic flights.
The flight profile is: climbing to 10 000ft, 30mn of cruise during which the passengers need to have the best visual experience, fast descent back to the airport.
We are facing a tough but thrilling choice which is picking the right aircraft for this.
One of my partners is convinced we should pick the DA62: very simple to fly, sips less than 12GPH of JET and engine overhaul is very cheap compared to it's competitors.
While I agree it is the best in its category for travel purposes, I have many concerns regarding our actual operations:
-in the 7-seater configuration, the last row offers limited height and room and the window is so small!
-it has low wings which means less visibility and we are talking about scenic flights
-wingspan is 14,5m which means higher hangar cost.
-TBO of AE330 is currently 1000 hours which nullifies the interest of the cheap overhaul. I'm aware that Diamond aims to extend it to 2400hrs in the future but it took the AE300 5 years and 500 000hours of use (with 1000 models produced) to reach 1800hrs TBO so I have concerns about how long it will take to reach that goal.
-Diamond tries to have a simple, automotive-like maintenance on its products. However we are in a remote area and our airport is on the sea. I'm sceptic about the reliability of all the electronic systems in a corrosive atmosphere (marine air). I don't want to have the aircraft grounded every two week due to a problem tricky to diagnostize .
-And last I'm concerned about its actual single engine performance at 2300kg MTOM.
All these reasons make me choose the P68-C.: high wings, simple maintenance, good performances.
The main cons are:
-it burns AVGAS (but we import it ourselves and have low taxes on it so the price gap with JET is not that important)
-Engine overhaul is quite expansive and TBO is only 1600hrs for the turbocompressed version.
-Less efficient for other kind of operations which could include commuting to nearby islands in the future.
Price consideration is not the matter here as we would be going for a brand new plane and they are in the same price range.
Thanks in advance to anyone would could give me a experienced feedback on those aircrafts or even any 2 cents opinion as long it is motivated.:ok:
I operate a BE58 in a small mountainous tropical island. I currently do mainly aerial survey and private flights.
With my partners, we are looking to develop our business with Public transport by focusing on scenic flights.
The flight profile is: climbing to 10 000ft, 30mn of cruise during which the passengers need to have the best visual experience, fast descent back to the airport.
We are facing a tough but thrilling choice which is picking the right aircraft for this.
One of my partners is convinced we should pick the DA62: very simple to fly, sips less than 12GPH of JET and engine overhaul is very cheap compared to it's competitors.
While I agree it is the best in its category for travel purposes, I have many concerns regarding our actual operations:
-in the 7-seater configuration, the last row offers limited height and room and the window is so small!
-it has low wings which means less visibility and we are talking about scenic flights
-wingspan is 14,5m which means higher hangar cost.
-TBO of AE330 is currently 1000 hours which nullifies the interest of the cheap overhaul. I'm aware that Diamond aims to extend it to 2400hrs in the future but it took the AE300 5 years and 500 000hours of use (with 1000 models produced) to reach 1800hrs TBO so I have concerns about how long it will take to reach that goal.
-Diamond tries to have a simple, automotive-like maintenance on its products. However we are in a remote area and our airport is on the sea. I'm sceptic about the reliability of all the electronic systems in a corrosive atmosphere (marine air). I don't want to have the aircraft grounded every two week due to a problem tricky to diagnostize .
-And last I'm concerned about its actual single engine performance at 2300kg MTOM.
All these reasons make me choose the P68-C.: high wings, simple maintenance, good performances.
The main cons are:
-it burns AVGAS (but we import it ourselves and have low taxes on it so the price gap with JET is not that important)
-Engine overhaul is quite expansive and TBO is only 1600hrs for the turbocompressed version.
-Less efficient for other kind of operations which could include commuting to nearby islands in the future.
Price consideration is not the matter here as we would be going for a brand new plane and they are in the same price range.
Thanks in advance to anyone would could give me a experienced feedback on those aircrafts or even any 2 cents opinion as long it is motivated.:ok: