6 New Diamond DA40s to Enhance the Flying Operations Unit Traning Fleet
By Malcolm Good, Director of Flying Operations Unit
On Friday 7 February the FOU commissioned the first two of six new Diamond Aircraft Industries DA40 XLT Diamond Star aeroplanes. The launch event hosted at the FOU featured Professor Attila Brungs, Vice Chancellor and President, and Professor Sven Rogge, Dean of Science.
Professor Brungs and our own Michael de Manincor then took to the skies in VH-GNJ, actually the second off the line, in a tour of Sydney including the harbour and the Kensington campus.
On Friday 7 February the FOU commissioned the first two of six new Diamond Aircraft Industries DA40 XLT Diamond Star aeroplanes. The launch event hosted at the FOU featured Professor Attila Brungs, Vice Chancellor and President, and Professor Sven Rogge, Dean of Science.
Professor Brungs and our own Michael de Manincor then took to the skies in VH-GNJ, actually the second off the line, in a tour of Sydney including the harbour and the Kensington campus.
Since February, four of the six aeroplanes have been progressively commissioned and are now in service, having completed more than 500 hours’ flying with students. The remaining two DA40s are in Australia undergoing the final stages of assembly and entry onto the register and will be operational within weeks.
Apart from the feel of being new, the aeroplanes are equipped with the latest Garmin G1000 NXi and Avidyne TAS605A – Traffic Awareness System, which provides detailed information about other possibly conflicting aircraft to improve safety.
We are taking advantage of the extra aircraft for as long as possible in advance of Western Sydney airport airspace becoming active in June 2026, at which point the traditional training area disappears. Although the airspace arrangements will be challenging (flight notifications required for every flight from Bankstown in addition to new training areas southeast, south, and southwest of Camden), the school is committed to flying training in the Sydney Basin.
Amendments to the underlying philosophy and content of the flying training syllabus will be used to minimise the impacts of the airspace, and see us return to awarding the PPL to students. The RPL flight test will be discontinued and training area solo flying moved to later in the syllabus when students will be more equipped to manage the airspace.
You can watch some footage of our VC Prof Attila Brungs taking flight here: