Tony - That is one bad-ass looking 850... great panel and awesome cosmetics in and out. Congrats and enjoy!

Living the dream. Congratulations.

Awesome! Tony you da man!

Keep us all posted on your transition I love to hear your thoughts on the FL's and always getting arrival and departure procedures.

The best part of flying in the FL's and one of my best memories flying with Mark H for the first time in the CII was calling into center, "Kansas City Center Citation ***AJ flight level 340"! Replied by KC center, "citation ***AJ Hello". I thought wow that was a short check in what's up with that? Then I realized oh yeah I set 29.92 going through 18K so there is no local altimeter setting. Wow cross country cruise flight just go so much easier, and faster!

Anyway I'm coming up on 300hrs of turbine time now and finally getting comfortable. Expecting arrivals and departure procedures instead of making me nervous that I'm going to screw them up I look forward to already knowing what they are going to give me. Basically it's always getting a heading on take off followed by direct to one of the fixes on the DP and usually not the first one.

Your going to love the turbine power, smoothness, pressurization and the speed just means you can go farther.

Congrats Buddy!

Great looking plane!

I'm late to the party (not on here much anymore), but just wanted to say congrats! That's a beautiful plane!

Very nice Tony! That is one sweet ride. I think you did well and you will be very happy with the TBM - it is fast, quiet, efficient and fun to fly. I'll have to drop in for a ride.

Tony,
As I mentioned earlier..."burning jet fuel, what a dream". I am curious what your wife thinks about losing the parachute. You mentioned a year or two ago that she was flying more often or more willing since you switched to the Cirrus. I'm hoping she just got more comfortable overall with flying

Glenn,

Interesting question which we talked about quite a bit. My wife has certainly gotten more comfortable flying and her frequency of flying increased her desire for more room, less noise and no tubes in her nose. That combined with the reliability of a turbine has offset some of her fears that the parachute assuaged. Also, the fact that both of our sons are older and could fend for themselves if they had to increased her comfort level with the perceived risk of private flying. She'd still like a chute...

or a second engine..........


or


a pilatus with a bathroom

or a second engine..........


or


a pilatus with a bathroom

Holy cow Tony! I can't believe I missed this thread, as I've been looking for it...

A huge congrats to you my friend. What an absolutely gorgeous bird and a huge accomplishment for you. I took a ride in a TBM700 many moons ago and still can't get the experience out of my head. What a machine. If I had the bucks, I would have one right now, no doubt.

I'm very happy for you and love that you got such a gorgeous bird that's so well equipped. Talk about having your cake and eat it too...

Funny you mention your wife's impression of a single with no chute. Anticipating a step up to turbine some day, I've been coaching her that a SE turbine is inherently safer than a piston single or a piston twin. When the day comes however many years in the future, I think she'll be OK with it, especially given the significant difference in speed.

Congrats again Tony! Please write back any and all details you can...

A couple of folks have asked me to post about the training I did in the TBM so having finished the initial work this week I thought I'd give a brief report along with my initial observations about flying the plane.

I did the Simcom initial course in Orlando in the 850 sim as they don't yet have a sim equipped with G600's. The course consists of 20 hours of ground school and 12 hours in the sim which is a non motion sim. I found Simcom to be extremely accommodating and helpful. They scheduled my class to start on Sunday instead of Monday to accommodate my travel schedule and my instructor was first rate.

As practically everything I have ever read says, its a lot harder to fly a sim than the plane! And, unfortunately, the sim's AP never seemed to work so I got to do almost all of it by hand which was really a good, though trying experience. What I also learned was that I didn't need to be intimidated by the sim. From reading a lot of pireps over the years I had the impression that you have to be practically super human to do well. You don't. Learning to deal with all the various emergencies while flying in IMC by hand was a great experience. I'm looking forward to doing a recurrent in about 6 months.

Ground school was excellent and I felt a lot better about systems knowledge after finishing. My instructor really fleshed out things I had been studying on my own.

The toughest part of sim school was the hurricane bearing down on Florida. In order to get out of there before the airport shut down we crammed the last couple of days into one. On my final day I did 3 two hour sim sessions back to back! By the end of that experience I was beat but also felt really confident having been able to do it.

This week I did my in airplane training. I flew with an experienced TBM instructor for three and half days this week and flew a total of 20 hours in the plane. We did a lot of air work to begin with. The plane stalls in a very benign manner in all stall regimes. Slow flight and VFR maneuvers are easy. The plane is very easy to fly by hand. We did a lot of traffic pattern work and I lost count of the number of landings. We did a fair number of emergencies in the plane including descents (The ground is coming at you really fast at 260 knots!), various failures and so forth. Power off landings are always fun and we did a few of those. Really, the TBM handles extremely well and is as easy to fly in the pattern as a big 172. I was very impressed.

Of course we did a lot of approaches of all kinds to nail down the avionics and the most difficult thing for me was just figuring out what the G600/GTN750 combination does differently than the G1000 I've been flying. Really, once I got that sorted flying approaches was straightforward. The GTN 750 is absolutely amazing! It's easy to use, intuitive (for Garmin users), very customizable and the amount of information available is incredible.

Some of the things I was initially intimidated by like the physical size of the airplane, starting and operating the engine and so forth took a couple of flights to accommodate too. I tried not to look at the Shadin fuel flow meter but I think I burned about a thousand gallons of fuel. Like Scarlett O'Hara I'll think about that tomorrow...

I just returned from my first cross country to Chicago and it was awesome! Not only faster (a lot) than what I'm used to but far more comfortable. I'm looking forward to a 1300 mile (each way) trip next week. I've posted a photo below of the G600 in cruise. It's fast compared to what I'm used to. I looked at a lot of options before settling in on this one. So far I'm really happy with the choice. It's a serious airplane and demands respect but with good training I think it will be a safe, fast mode of transportation for us.

Doubt that smile will wear off Tony...

Nice write up Tony and WOW what performance! What a fantastic step up in capability.

What did your insurance company impose for requirements beyond the initial sum training?

Don,

I'm done! Three days of in airplane with instructor plus sim and I'm good to go. I plan however, to do some additional training flights with a local CFI and I'm taking another pilot along next week as I fly into the NE for the first time. But that's just common sense. Or cowardice. You pick!