Diamonds are falling from the sky :-(

Uh, no good at all. 2 pretty much new airframes ruined.

Impressive that everyone survived and very glad to hear that. That cell seems to be able to absorb quite some impact forces!

The DA50 accident stated a post crash fire which I believe is a rarity (if not a first?) for Diamonds due to their fuel cell design.

Definitely the cabin structure provides some crash worthiness unlike classic aluminium structures which provide none at all.

IO390 wrote:

Definitely the cabin structure provides some crash worthiness unlike classic aluminium structures which provide none at all.

Say what? This is purely a question of design and how much weight you can allow. Diamond has a focus on crash resistance, but any braced high wing design has crash resistance per default.

The DA50 climbed to a maximum height of 300ft above threshold. That’s ugly. That’s exactly the altitude band where nothing really must happen ever …

Fire is the single most dangerous thing in such accidents. Quite a few people have died after initially surviving the crash in the post crash fire, not only in GA but generally.

IO390 wrote:

Definitely the cabin structure provides some crash worthiness unlike classic aluminium structures which provide none at all.

Some older designs are surprisingly crashworthy, such as the steel cage in Mooneys. Many people had their lives saved by that steel cage, I have some friends who survived accidents either unhurt or who recovered from accidents which would almost certainly have been fatal in other constructions.

However, this often comes to naught if fire breaks out. I know several cases of crashes where the people inside were ok at first but were either burnt to death or severely hurt by the fire. I recall a Robin which flipped over and trapped the unhurt pilot inside, he died in the post crash fire. The Acclaim crash in the US comes to mind where the pilot also initially survived but succumbed to burns weeks later. And there was a Mooney Eagle which crashed hit a wall at Ragusa airfield in Italy some years back, those people also were alive until the fire consumed the airplane.

And of course we’ve seen quite a lot of airliner accidents where fire played a major role, such as the 737 at Manchester, the DC9 at Calgary, the 747’s at Tenerife, where again most people were alive post crash but burned.

Crashworthiness and fire are two things which have to be paid more attention to in design. What good does it do if you got a crash worthy cabin which to the left and right have two massive fire sources in form of the fuel tanks which are not crash proof, fuel lines and hot engines and exhausts.

In the case of the Diamond here, the people apparently managed to get out on time.

There is not a lot which scares me in GA but the fact that post accident fires claim a lot of lives in otherwise structurally very strong airframes has been one point of concern I’ve had for years, also with my own plane.

Single door planes are at a huge disadvantage for obvious reasons but Diamonds are 2-door.

Failure at 300ft is bad news anywhere except over a completely clean surface.

Peter wrote:

Single door planes are at a huge disadvantage for obvious reasons but Diamonds are 2-door.

Yes or at least usable emergency exits such as the Beech models have. Worse than one door may even be a canopy type exit, as they can be blocked totally if a plane flips over. That is what happened to the guy I knew in the Robin.

Also the facility of ingress and exit should be a point needed to watch. e.g. getting out of a Cessna is much easier than out of almost all low wing airplanes.

Please keep this thread type specific, or start a new thread on general emergency egress procedures or whatever.