Such a beautiful name for an aircraft. Diamond. When speaking of the plane, I often think of the song "Diamond in the sky", which is so accurate! And when it comes to the name Eclipse, I picture the airplane passing the shield of the sun.
Diamond DA-20 Eclipse, which I've had a pleasure to fly, brought my attention by its sailplane-like look. Knowing just a little bit less than I do now about aviation, I thought that maybe this plane is a motorglider. Not exactly, but according to one of its pilots it's closely related to a motorglider (perhaps HK36 Super Dimona).
SP-AWM, presented below, belongs to Aeroklub Warmińsko-Mazurski, one of the aeroclubs of Poland. It actually took its registration from the club's abbreviation - AW-M.
Speaking of the handicraft itself, I put a lot of heart in it, and it was a truly challenging airplane. I didn't want to go for some easy solutions for the tail's design and I decided to embroider it, more or less accurately. I have devoted outstandingly much time on embroidering details themselves, which was nearly three days. The result, though rather symbolic, was definitely worth it.
Diamond is the second airplane of mine that has an engine with a rotating blade. The airplane has a lot of minor details such as clearly visible Pitot tubes, walk-in steps or engine pipes, but I limited myself only to these most vital.
Here comes the greatest challenge: landing gear. Diamond is the second aircraft of mine that has a fixed landing gear (I'm not counting gliders), but unlike Falke, it's not a tail-dragger, meaning that the gear is located in front and central part of the aircraft, and the tail is supposed to stay up. At the beginning, when I did the first gear attempts, Diamond would lean back and rest on its tail. I have eventually solved the problem by ballasting the front part of the fuselage, but I appreciate it as an important lesson of model building and the aerodynamics (mechanics, actually) in general. I learned the importance of the airplane being properly balanced and what determines the weight distribution.
The original airplane, picture taken from AW-M's website
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