About Diamond Aircraft
Based out of Austria, Diamond Aircraft manufactures the most complete range of certified piston aircraft which have gained worldwide recognition for their performance, safety, and innovation. Founded in 1981, Diamond Aircraft has over 1,100 employees worldwide and more than 5,000 aircraft in global operations.
Included in their range are two of the best known fixed-wing light aircraft; the DA42 and DA62, which are ideally suited for special mission workflows from law enforcement operations, search and rescue missions to disaster management and infrastructure and environmental monitoring.
“Our long-standing relationship with Haivision has enabled us to offer our clients high performance, cost-efficient, state-of-the-art airborne solutions ideally suited for a wide variety of missions.”
Stefan Haim
Technical Manager, Special Mission Aircraft, Diamond Aircraft Austria
The Challenge
Special Mission Aircraft: Precision From Above
As part of the company’s commitment to leading-edge technology, Diamond Aircraft has recently taken its special mission concept DA42 MPP and DA62 MPP aircraft a step further in order to offer its customers a range of 360° turnkey solutions. The concept aims to provide a one-stop-shop to tailor a fully remote certified sensing platform-specific to each customer’s needs. Designed for a variety of use cases, from surveillance to geo survey to HD TV, their turnkey solutions comprise a cost-efficient fixed wing remote sensing Diamond Aircraft platform, fully equipped with airborne sensors, datalinks, ground-stations, global support, spare parts, tooling, transport as well as the corresponding pilot, operator, and maintenance training.
In the drive for cost-efficiency and the ability to future proof their platform, Diamond Aircraft explored alternatives to costly traditional satellite networks, (VSAT) for backhaul including other line-of-sight networks such as MIMO and MANET radio data links. However, without dedicated bandwidth, transporting video via these networks can be extremely challenging.
The Solution
Partnership with Haivision
Depending on the on-board mission package selected by the client, Diamond Aircraft is using a mix of Haivision’s Makito X video encoders and Kraken video transcoder on the aircraft platform. Thanks to Haivision’s low latency video streaming solutions and HEVC compression capabilities combined with the power of the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) protocol embedded in its solution, bitrates can be brought down to extremely low levels (as low as 100kbps), making it possible to send video over constrained networks, common in ISR workflows.
In the ground control station, designed to operate as the counterpart to the Special Mission Aircraft, the Haivision SRT Gateway and Haivision Media Platform are deployed alongside an additional Kraken transcoder.
The Result
Today there are more than 100 MPP Special Mission Aircraft in operation providing intelligence and security at different agencies and governments worldwide. Whether used for border protection, search and rescue operations or for surveillance and reconnaissance missions, Diamond Aircraft is committed to offering their customers best-in-class technologies, like Haivision, to expand the capabilities of their Special Mission Aircraft.
