Why I Chose the DA-62 Over the SR22 (And What I'd Choose Today)

In late 2020, I was a newly minted private pilot with a high-performance endorsement, a recently empty apartment, and an inexplicable conviction that I needed to buy a plane.

I’d been renting after getting my license and hating it. Scheduling windows. Daily minimums. Climbing into a cockpit that smelled like forty other people’s hours. I wanted my own aircraft—something I knew inside and out, that would be there when I wanted it, that I could take for a week without asking anyone’s permission.

Two planes kept coming up in my research: the Cirrus SR22 and the Diamond DA-62. I’d trained in an SR20 at Nassau Flyers, so the Cirrus felt familiar. The DA-62 was the unknown—a European twin-diesel I’d never flown.

I still don’t know what you’re supposed to call it informally. The DA-42, its little sister, is known as the “Twin Star”—ATC uses it, pilots use it, everyone agrees. The DA-62 is essentially the same aircraft scaled up slightly, but the name never followed. Sometimes ATC calls it a Twin Star anyway. My instructor called it the “Diamond Twin,” which sounds like something you’d name a jewelry store. Five years later, I still haven’t gotten a straight answer. I’ve given up asking.

I bought the DA-62. Here’s exactly why.

The Short Answer: Seven Seats (Sort Of)

If you ask me to reduce the decision to a single sentence: I bought the DA-62 because it has seven seats and the SR22 has five.

That sounds simple, but it wasn’t a casual preference. At the time, I had two young kids from my previous marriage. I was newly divorced and cautiously optimistic about what the future would look like—which, for me, meant being intentionally vague about family size.

I decided to plan for uncertainty. If I ever found a partner, if a blended family came together, if the holidays got complicated in the best possible way—I wanted room for everyone. Seven seats let me leave that door open.

Five years later, I have four kids total, a partner, and I routinely load that aircraft for weekend trips. The seven seats weren’t a luxury. They turned out to be a necessity I couldn’t have fully predicted.

Now—a note of honesty, because “seven seats” is a little misleading in practice.

The rear two seats in the DA-62 are best suited for small children. Adults can get back there, but you’re not going to enjoy it on a two-hour flight. Diamond markets this as a seven-seat aircraft, and technically it is, but the real-world cabin is more like a comfortable four, a workable five, and a “we can squeeze a couple of kids in the back” six or seven.

What the spec sheet also doesn’t capture is the load capacity, which is where the DA-62 genuinely outclasses its single-engine competition. The DA-62 has a useful load of just under 1,600 lbs, with a full-fuel payload of around 1,000 lbs. In plain English: you can carry four to five adults with full fuel and luggage and bags. Full fuel. Not “fuel for a short hop so we can squeeze everyone in”—actually full tanks, real bags, a proper family weekend’s worth of gear.

Compare that to the Bonanza G36, which is widely considered the gold standard of high-performance singles. Useful load around 1,020 lbs — which sounds competitive until you fill the tanks. Top off a Bonanza and you’re left with roughly 576 lbs of payload. That’s three passengers at FAA standard weights with almost nothing left for bags. You’re constantly doing the math: do I take full fuel or do I take people? The SR22 is in the same boat.

The DA-62’s diesel efficiency is a big part of why this works — Jet-A is denser than Avgas, but the Austro engines are so economical that the fuel weight penalty is much less severe. You don’t have to choose between range and passengers. The plane just carries everything.

Here’s what I’ve actually found: the rear seats are useful in two scenarios. One is the obvious one—extra kids for a weekend trip. The other, which I use far more often, is that they fold flat and turn the back of the plane into a cargo area. Ski bags for Vermont. A week’s worth of luggage for a family of four making a run to Florida. That flexibility is genuinely practical in a way that doesn’t show up in any comparison chart.

If you’re looking for an aircraft to fly yourself around, the SR22 is perfectly sized. But if family travel is any part of the vision—current or future—I’d think very carefully about whether five seats and a smaller useful load is actually enough.

Twin-Engine: Safety Redundancy

The DA-62 has two engines. The SR22 has one.

Before I explain why that mattered to me, I want to say something clearly: the Cirrus CAPS system is genuinely remarkable engineering. It’s a whole-aircraft parachute—you pull a handle and the entire plane descends under a chute. It has saved lives. Real people are alive today because of it. And if you’re the kind of pilot who has a spouse at home wondering whether this is all a terrible idea, the CAPS system is an extraordinarily compelling answer to that conversation. Cirrus deserves enormous credit for building it and normalizing it in GA.

My situation was different. I was buying a plane to fly my kids. I was going to fly IFR in the Northeast, where you commit to cloud layers that don’t forgive much, and over water to places like the Bahamas where a single engine failure over open ocean leaves you with very few good options.

For me, the answer to “what happens if an engine fails” wasn’t a parachute—it was a second engine. Having two engines didn’t just add a backup. It changed which flights I was willing to take in the first place.

Five years in, I’ve never once wished I had fewer engines.

A Word on the “Twins Are More Dangerous” Argument

Any CFI worth their logbook will tell you that a twin with one engine out can be more dangerous than a single-engine aircraft. They’re not wrong. Asymmetric thrust — one engine pulling hard while the other is dead — creates a yawing moment that can kill an unprepared pilot faster than a simple engine failure in a single would. It’s a real phenomenon and the accident record backs it up.

But here’s what those same CFIs will usually acknowledge if you push them: not all twins are created equal. The DA-62 has some of the most benign single-engine handling characteristics of any piston twin flying — comparable, honestly, to the Cessna Skymaster, which was specifically engineered for centerline thrust to eliminate the asymmetric problem entirely. The DA-62 isn’t centerline thrust, but Diamond did their homework. It’s a remarkably well-mannered airplane when you lose an engine.

That said, “well-mannered” is not the same as “forgiving of ignorance.” You still need to know what you’re doing. Which brings me to the next point.

Multi-Engine Training Built Into the Plan

Here’s something nobody tells you when you’re debating this choice: buying the twin forced me to get my multi-engine rating. That might sound like a burden. It wasn’t.

I trained for my multi-engine and instrument ratings in my own airplane over four months. By the time I flew N520RA solo for the first time, I knew that aircraft completely. Its systems, its quirks, its feel in the pattern.

If I had bought the SR22, I would have been comfortable from day one—and I probably never would have gotten my instrument rating on that aggressive a timeline. The DA-62 pushed me to be a better pilot faster. That’s had compounding value ever since.

Worth noting: four months was aggressive because I was pursuing both the multi and instrument ratings simultaneously, in my own aircraft, from scratch. The multi rating on its own is a much shorter road — which I’ll get to.

The Fuel Question

The DA-62 runs on Jet-A. The SR22 runs on Avgas. That difference matters more than most people realize when they’re shopping.

Jet-A is available everywhere — every airport that handles jets stocks it. Avgas is increasingly scarce at smaller fields, which adds routing constraints on longer trips. Jet-A typically runs about a dollar a gallon cheaper at the pump, and if you’re flying regularly, discount programs like CAA and Avfuel’s AVTRIP network bring it down further. In 700 hours of flying N520RA, I’ve saved over $10,000 in fuel costs compared to an equivalent Avgas aircraft. That number doesn’t jump off the page on its own — but it feels pretty good every time I pull up to the pump and tell them to top her off.

There’s also the longer view: leaded avgas is facing increasing regulatory pressure to disappear entirely. Jet-A isn’t part of that conversation. It was a minor consideration when I bought in 2020. It’s becoming a more significant one every year.

Speed, Climb, and the Montreal Trip

Here’s something I didn’t expect going in: the DA-62 and the SR22 are, for all practical purposes, the same speed.

On paper, the DA-62 cruises around 190 knots. The SR22 is right there with it. The twin has two engines and more total horsepower, but it also weighs significantly more, and the two factors largely cancel each other out in cruise. The DA-62 climbs at around 1,280 feet per minute — respectable, not spectacular. The SR22 actually climbs a touch faster. The DA-62’s acceleration on the takeoff roll is strong, two engines spinning up together, but once you’re in the air and leveled off, you’re not going to pull away from a well-flown SR22.

I know this not just from spec sheets, but from flying it.

A friend and I once flew from KISP to Montreal in formation — him in his SR22, me in the DA-62. Same altitudes, same headings, side by side the whole way. We hit the same speeds throughout the entire flight. There was no meaningful performance gap between the two planes in actual conditions, and we had about as direct a comparison as you can get short of a controlled test.

I tell that story because I think it’s important to be honest: if you’re choosing the DA-62 over the SR22 because you think you’re getting into a significantly faster airplane, you’re going to be disappointed. That’s not what the DA-62 is.

What you are getting is the same speed — with two engines, seven seats, 1,000 lbs of full-fuel payload, and Jet-A diesel efficiency. The DA-62 isn’t faster than the SR22. It’s just more of everything else, at essentially the same pace.

The G1000 NXi

I had trained on glass cockpits in the SR20 and was hooked on modern avionics. The DA-62 comes with the Garmin G1000 NXi with a GFC600 autopilot, which is the standard setup across a huge swath of modern GA aircraft.

I’ll be honest: Garmin is not known for intuitive user interfaces. The G1000 has a learning curve, and there are moments where you’ll find yourself thinking why is this buried four menus deep? It’s not elegant software design.

But here’s why that doesn’t really matter: it’s everywhere. If you’ve flown a G1000 in any other plane—a Cessna 172, a Beechcraft Bonanza, a DA40—you already know the DA-62’s cockpit. The logic, the button placement, the workflow is consistent across the platform. That familiarity is worth a lot, especially when you’re heads-down in IMC and need to reprogram something without thinking about it.

The NXi is the updated version, which adds some meaningful improvements over the original G1000—faster processors, sharper displays, better map rendering. But the core experience is the same one hundreds of thousands of GA pilots already know. When you’re hand-flying an approach at minimums, the last thing you want is to be thinking about where a button is. The G1000 may not be beautiful software, but it’s software you already know — and that’s worth more than elegant design you’re still figuring out.

The Honest Drawback: The DA-62 Lives in a Weird Market

Here’s the thing nobody puts in a DA-62 brochure: this aircraft sits in an awkward spot in the pilot market, and it’s worth being honest about that.

Most pilots who pursue their multi-engine rating are on a career track. They’re building time toward the airlines or a charter job, and they’re flying the cheapest twin they can find — a DA-42, a Seminole, a Duchess — logging hours as efficiently as possible before stepping up to a turboprop or a jet. For them, leasing a DA-62 at $650/hour makes no economic sense. They need cheap hours, not a premium cabin.

On the other end, the vast majority of private pilots never get their multi-engine rating at all. They earn their private certificate, maybe add an instrument rating, and stop there. A single-engine license covers the planes most renters ever want to fly.

That leaves a relatively narrow slice of the pilot population that has a multi rating, doesn’t need to fly cheap, and is looking for a serious aircraft for personal or family use. That’s the DA-62 pilot.

What I’d actually tell any instrument-rated private pilot is that most people have no idea how close they are to that slice. A multi-engine rating is not a year-long undertaking. You can do it in two dedicated weekends of focused flying. The training is genuinely fun. The practical test is manageable for any competent instrument pilot. And the difference in what you can fly afterward is enormous.

I’m not going to pretend the DA-62 is for everyone. It isn’t. But if you’re already flying IFR in a single and you haven’t thought seriously about your multi, you’re leaving a lot on the table. Two weekends stands between you and this aircraft.

What Would I Choose Today?

Exactly the same thing.

The DA-62 has been every bit as capable as I hoped and more reliable than I feared. Five years and 700 hours later, it still feels like the right tool for the missions I actually fly: family trips, cross-country IFR, the occasional international adventure.

The SR22 is an exceptional airplane. If you’re a solo flyer, or a couple without a growing family in the picture, it’s a genuine contender — safer than almost anything else in the single-engine piston world, with avionics and speed that hold up against anything at its price point.

But the DA-62 asks a different question. Not what do you need right now — but what do you need the plane to be capable of? More people, more gear, more range, more weather, more confidence over water. If the answer to any of those is “more,” the DA-62 is worth every dollar of the premium.

Five years ago, I made that bet. I’m still cashing it out.

N520RA is available for dry lease at KFRG Republic Airport. If you’re a multi-engine rated pilot in the New York area — or you’re thinking about getting there — and you want to fly a modern DA-62 without the capital commitment of ownership, let’s talk.

Daniel Eisner is the owner of N520RA, a Diamond DA-62 based at KFRG. When he’s not flying, he’s building businesses, raising four kids, and planning the next adventure.