Engineer working on turbo system of DA40

After 3 days of waiting we had an engineer come over from Bournemouth to fix the plane.

Even when there is Diamond Industries HQ 100km away, the maintenance company wasted 3 days of our life and didn’t get us anywhere.

The engineer started work minutes after arrival 10am .

First he took off the avionics cover and started replacing the broken switch. It was fun shielding him from the cold wind to make sure that his wireless soldering iron works.

Then it was to find the fault with ECUs, after connecting the diagnostics software it was showing that both CAM sensors failed. Some resetting, power checks with approval from Tower/Ground ( it was fun to see all these cars waiting for us to finish full power checks ) and CAM sensors didn’t show up as faulty. Damn. However another problem was found. The Boost of Turbo was dropping down to 30% from it’s normal operating 60-80% range.

Many parts were changed, still no progress. After few hours we had enough, cold, lack of any perspective that we are going to fly today ( weather and the aircraft were not cooperating ) we headed to the hotel to get ourselves another room for the 3rd night.

After checking back on the Engineer he was sitting inside the cockpit with rain falling , doors closed, Left front seat removed and his hands down, connecting up the FADECs to download data for diagnostics at the company. Later on he has removed the FADEC from the aircraft and headed back with it to England.

We had tried to get more information from the maintenance company, however none was coming. After text message from the engineer that he is not coming the next day and that we can expect a long delay, we decided that this is it.

The Euro Trip is done and gone and not really what we were planning for.

Few hours later we booked very expensive tickets back to London, purchased carry on bags ( as we had to leave ours at the club due to weight restrictions ) and boarded 6.30 am flight to STN.  There we took couch to Victoria then to Bournemouth and we paid for time flown and left them with their broken aircraft.

Whole time we were wondering why they didn’t give us the sister aircraft G-OCCL … the one which we flown last couple of days and never had a single issue with…