Tom Greene

DA40 Owner

"My partner in the airplane and I wanted to buy a plane to make the world smaller for us. We live in Kentucky, and our railroads are in Illinois, Indiana and West Virginia. I also have family in Michigan - and the DA40 is a great airplane to bring all of these places closer together."

"We knew when we looked for an airplane that we wanted a modern, composite plane. It's like with computers - you might as well get the latest technology, so much changes all the time."

"We looked very hard at other, higher-performance composite planes. Frankly, a lot of those were just too much airplane for us: I am a new, VFR pilot, and my partner is just getting back into aviation after taking a 30-year break. The DA40 was the perfect fit for us now - we will use it to get IFR trained, and it is a great traveling plane. It's great to know that down the road, when we need more airplane, Diamond will have the DA50 we can trade up to, with a similar cockpit that will make transitioning easy to do."

"The economics of the DA40 were very favorable in our decision. The fuel consumption at 10 gph is great, the pre-paid 2-year maintenance program made costs very predictable, and reasonable insurance rates even for us lower-time pilots just made sense for us."

"Wherever we fly, the line guys always give us two thumbs up - I guess they really like the looks of our DA40!"

"The more we fly our DA40, the more we like it. It's a great performing aircraft - and overall we couldn't be happier with our purchase."

"I would highly recommend Danny Potter from Steel Aviation, my Diamond representative. Dixie Chopper, my service center, has been unbelievable, too: they really bent over backwards to get our recent inspection done within a very short time window we had between two trips. Everybody we have dealt with in the Diamond family has just been great."

"Some of the other planes, there are so many of them out there, it's almost as though they flooded the market, and I am concerned what that means for resale values down the road. The Diamond still has more uniqueness to it - like the Harley Davidson I own, back when I bought it, before they became more of a mass-market product."