When Diamond Aircraft surprised the 2002 Berlin airshow with an out-of-the-blue new twin powered by a pair of converted automotive diesel engines, there weren’t many visible reasons why it should succeed and a lot of reasons why it couldn’t. The twin market was flat. A new engine married to a new airframe can be the shortcut to disaster and no modern engine maker had commercially converted gasoline automotive engines for aviation use. A diesel conversion? Are you kidding?
A decade-and-a-half later, Diamond’s DA42 still sells, albeit at a fraction of the production volume it once enjoyed. And the factory that built the diesel engines, the former Thielert Aircraft Engine company, now owned by the Continental Motors Group, itself a subsidiary of the Chinese AVIC International, is still perking along.
Even before AVIC injected badly needed capital into the insolvent Thielert works last year, the landscape for the diesel maker had shifted. In 2006, it was booming, thanks to high demand for the DA42. But two years later, it was bankrupt and in 2009, the entire industry tanked, taking sales of aircraft diesels with it.