CEO of Estonian operator Diamond Sky Ken Koort has taken delivery of a Piper PA-34, which will be used for flying friends and family.

"There will be no commercial operations at the moment but we do have an AOC in our company, so we might add it on at a later stage," he tells EBAN. "This might even happen before the end of the year, because it is a good aircraft to fly locally within the Scandinavia and Baltics region.

"There will always be demand for such an aircraft because it is IFR-equipped. The weather is quite cold where we are in Tallinn, especially in the winter, so you need to be able to fly in icing conditions. I think when you consider the cost of the aircraft versus what you get, it is a good machine. It is not a jet but it certainly does the job."

Koort has previously flown the Diamond DA62, Piper PA-32 and other light aircraft. He considers the PA-34 as neither a step up nor a step down. "It can fly for three hours quite easily, so you can cover a reasonable distance in that time. You can certainly cover anywhere in Scandinavia. The business aviation market here is growing, slowly but surely, though there are no major changes happening. Our operation Diamond Sky is one of the biggest in the area as we have a Nextant 400 XTi and a Piaggio Avanti, which we operate on behalf of private owners. They are all good aircraft.

"It is like with cars; somebody likes Lexus, somebody else likes Mercedes. They all fly well and have differences in seat configurations and so on. In the end, it's all the same.”