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Heads up for those of us flying NGs:

I just received word from my Diamond dealer that my 2021 DA40NG will be impacted by an imminent service bulletin regarding the high pressure fuel pump. Apparently there is a reasonable expectation this will escalate to an airworthiness directive. I'm being advised to get my plane down to the maintenance facility (about an hour flight) to avoid the plane being grounded at my home airport where Astro maintenance is hard to come by.

Guidance is that the service bulletin will be issued today or Monday and impact many DA40NGs and also many DA42s.

Greg

Here is the MSB from Austro. Hopefully Diamond can tell me whether I have the Cylinder Head part that is affected.

Greg,
this is running on a thread on the Austro topic page as well. Concur with all your observations, this has quietly become a big deal, especially when schools will have to ground scores of airframes.

Donkadillapig wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 9:18 am Greg,
this is running on a thread on the Austro topic page as well. Concur with all your observations, this has quietly become a big deal, especially when schools will have to ground scores of airframes.

The other thread is about MSB-E4-034. This thread is about a new one; -35, also concerning the high pressure fuel pump driving gear but with different criteria for determining affected engines.

MSB-E4-035 is potentially more extensive and contains a Catch-22. It does not specify aircraft serial numbers, dates of manufacture or engine numbers, all of which we can look up. It only references a cylinder head part number, information which is not easily accessible to most of us. And it has to be done before further flight.

Does your engine have cylinder head part number E4A-12-500-000? The MSB states, "To identify the cylinder head installed, refer to the maintenance manual E4.08.04 chapter 85." The maintenance manual shows a picture and says, "Part No E4A-12-500-000 can be identified by the marking I, II, III, IV on the cylinder head cover."

To see these markings one has to remove the injector cover. Six pages of instructions on how to remove and replace the injector cover begins on page 201 of the maintenance manual, here: https://austroengine.at/uploads/pdf/MME40804r29.pdf

Since the manual refers to Part No E4A-12-500-000 as the "new style" cylinder head one might assume it would be all engines manufactured after a certain date. But they don't say that.

Dan, there is an alternative way to identify which cylinder head is installed. I emailed Diamond tech support on Friday and haven't heard back. Not good.

Scott, thank you for pointing me to the alternate way of identifying the cylinder head. Extra sweet since it looks like my 2020 engines have the not-affected, "old style" cylinder heads. Good luck on yours.

Thanks Dan.... I had not seen this.
So if I read 035 correctly (and I'm truly not sure I do). If my engine is already awaiting fuel pump intervention under 034, resolution of 034 will cover 035?? Seem correct?
035 just serves as an additional way to ID potentially affected engines??

Soareyes wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 6:22 pm Scott, thank you for pointing me to the alternate way of identifying the cylinder head. Extra sweet since it looks like my 2020 engines have the not-affected, "old style" cylinder heads. Good luck on yours.

Dan, I'm hoping my 2019 engine has the older style heads as well. At least it isn't on Premier's list of affected aircraft.

Other than this hiccup, how are you enjoying your DA42 vs your SR22?

I was surprised that my barely one year old plane had the "old style" of anything. But glad in terms of this MSB.

The fact that the -035 MSB did not specify a date of manufacture or serial number range may mean that both old and new styles were used in aircraft production for a period of time and maybe still. And the list of engine numbers in the related -034 MSB jumped around quite a bit.

Further conjecture; remember when it was announced a couple of years ago that Austro was going to start manufacturing their own engine blocks instead of getting them from Mercedes? https://www.avweb.com/recent-updates/bu ... re-engine/

I wonder if the "new style" are the new all-Austro engines.

Old style: New style:

Just got a call this afternoon....took delivery of a brand new DA-40 NG 2 weeks ago.....it has to back to the factory...but they couldn't tell me how long it would be there