Was there ever a final report on this accident?

Julian, just to be pedantic.... quote.. your point of no return is suddenly several miles behind you....
The Point of No-Return will not change, no matter what happens to your aircraft.
Also if it is behind you, then just continue....
.

My business designs and manufactures battery monitors for the specialist vehicles and defence applications - we own the IP for the worlds most accurate state of charge and state of health technology. Unless you have a state of health monitor there is no way to check if that battery is flat or f****d. Many batteries are damaged (permanently) with excessive discharge - a jump start being an obvious symptom of excessive discharge. If the DA42 systems are indeed as described here, there’s no way you should attempt to reuse a flattened battery. Accident waiting to happen. What a stupid system - why didn’t they employ a proper electrical engineer to design a sensible fail-safe system?

Most modern batteries are pure lead AGM types - they’ll accept as much current as you can throw at them as long as the voltage is properly regulated.

The only way to accurately monitor battery state of health is to monitor the charge and recharge trend and compare that against the stated capacity of the battery over time. Battery testers (even expensive ohmic ones) don’t work (Enersys the worlds largest battery manufacturer states that battery testers cannot and will not work with their batteries).

FWIW Id only ever fit the Concorde AGM or EnerSys Pure Lead battery in my aircraft..

Keep in mind that what the pilots did was completely against procedures published in the POH.
You can’t engineer ‘stupid’ out of a system.
I worked for a flightschool where we ended up having 4 of these.
MX kept a set of batteries on a trickle charger and we averaged about 1 jumpstart per month as inevitably Master Switches are left on during preflight or postflight inspections.
Never a problem if you follow the instructions

But what if the battery health is low due to excessive discharge? After charging there maybe just enough amp hours available to start the engines up etc but a short period of discharge could cause the voltage to sag.. starting engines use very very few amp hours so this scenario is possible. Just seems like a strange setup with the DA42 which could be avoided for not a lot of work and cost..

I have been flying a DA-42 recently and am interested in a bit of a follow-up in the intervening years since this accident.

It appears that that this happened in the early days when only Thielert engines were available and it appears that there were no ECU back-up batteries.

Was the solution a retrofit to the Thielert models with ECU back-up batteries or were there other changes?

I fly the Austro-engine versions but they used to be Thielerts. Did the factory-built Austro-engine versions get produced with ECU back-up batteries?

The Austro DA62s have:

Main Battery
2 x Alternators, each capable of supporting the entire electrical system.
Back up batteries for each ECU system (ie one left and one right).

The wiring schematic is rather busy (page 516 at http://support.diamond-air.at/filead...1-complete.pdf) but clearly there is loads of redundancy. I think the Austro 42s are similar.

Dont use standard trickle chargers on sealed AGM aircraft batteries (i.e. a standard automotive charger).. The ripple voltage and fixed voltage output will damage the battery... needs to be a 3 stage output charger with a Gel/AGM battery setting..

Hi All,
So looking at the POH for DA42 with TAE-125-02-99 engines, there are ECU backup batteries. I can't seem to determine whether these are something that was added after the double engine failure crash or something that was in place before the crash.

Does anyone know? Was OAM 42-129 in response to the issues that caused the crash?

Thanks
Matt