Magdeburg, Germany-based aerial survey company GeoFly has signed for a DA62 SurveyStar from Austrian manufacturer Diamond Aircraft, following a search for an optimal aircraft that would meet the requirements of survey flights at slow speeds and at low and medium altitudes.

The DA62 SurveyStar has been designed to combine the advantages of a turbine aircraft, with its long maintenance interval and jet fuel, with greater efficiency than regular piston aircraft. It will increase the overall mission efficiency with respect to costs and maintenance downtimes on survey flights within low and medium altitude.

GeoFly MD Aicke Damrau says: “It is very important for us to run an efficient operation and production in order comply with the latest customer demands. To achieve this target, we are using the newest sensor technology and various types of aircraft for different flight profiles. While we are using turbine aircraft for the higher altitude jobs, we have reached a certain limit of efficiency when using piston planes for low and medium altitude projects. The required 50-hour maintenance, in combination with high maintenance efforts on older aircraft and the failing Avgas situation outside Germany adds an increasing complexity to our wide operations and to the costs. This made us look out for new options on the aircraft market.

“We found the DA62 as the only real solution, because it offers much longer maintenance intervals, jet fuel usage and has impressively low operating costs. Considering those advantages, we expect to lift our data acquisition for low and medium altitude flights into a totally new level of efficiency. It’s our strong desire to let our customer and partner directly benefit from this improvement and to increase our all success.”

Diamond Aircraft sales manager for Europe and North America Mario Spiegel adds: “We are very excited about having a launch customer for the DA62 SurveyStar, who is such a strong and professional player in the survey industry. We have reacted to the common weak points of the current survey aircraft in the market, which are reliability and parts availability as well as the 50-hour maintenance intervals, which will be history by introducing the SurveyStar. The combination of modern glass cockpit and the use of jet fuel has great potential to revolutionise the survey market.”

Delivery is planned before the end of the year. The machine is equipped with a multi-sensor system for simultaneous data acquisition. The nose mount will be equipped with a LiDAR system and the 20 inch camera STC will be equipped with the latest large format camera system from Vexcel in combination with the GSM4000 from Somag and an IGI flight management system.