TBM time





Today I took delivery of a TBM 900.

It's slightly used, with 280 hours of time on it, but by all appearances looks brand new.  It's billed as the fastest single engine turbo-prop and with a typical cruise speed in the area of 325kts, I believe it.

A few things drew me to this particular model. I was able to get a demo ride in a similar one late last year, a 930 model, and found I liked it much more than I expected to.  It's powered by the well-proven PT6 turboprop engine that offers huge amounts of horsepower (850 in this install) coupled to relatively quiet and very reliable operation.

Coming from a Cirrus SR22, this airplane is basically 2x in all respects - twice the speed, twice the altitude, twice the load carrying capability, and darn near twice the range on full tanks.  The costs involved are more than 2x, but that is life in aviation.

Since moving to Texas, our family of four has had a desire to fly back to SC and GA more easily, and more quickly.  Our hope is to be able to make weekend trips that would have been too difficult to do previously.  We also want to do more traveling with our boys, and being able to do that more readily with our own aircraft is an inviting proposition.

So, after mulling it over for years, and getting very serious about it at Christmas time, I went through the multitude of steps to own a turbine powered airplane.

I took delivery on Friday and flew it home with my broker/instructor.  I felt like I was drinking from a fire hose, at least on takeoff and landing, but I learned a lot from that flight about the particulars of this aircraft, and expect to be able to ramp up nicely given plenty of training time.  The biggest thing to get used to so far seems to be the throttle response, but that was something I had to get a feel for in the Cirrus as well.

The next steps are all about that training.  I will be going to SimCom to get up to speed on flying this big bird as well as spending plenty of time flying with expert instructors.


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