When you put a sharp pencil to it, a 20-knot speed advantage for one airplane over another really isn’t squat. It amounts to 12 minutes on a 500-mile trip. But how about 50 knots or even 100? On a 1000-mile trip, that’s the difference between landing just in time for dinner or arriving early enough for a round of golf and cocktails. Above 300-knots cruise speed, the space-time scale shifts and that’s where the Daher-SOCATA TBM850 lives.
The airplane is a no-apologies, uncompromised high-altitude personal transportation aircraft that enjoys, if not high-volume sales, a loyal following and an improved market thanks to the lukewarm blooming of the very light jet market. Daher-SOCATA is positioned to sell about 30 to 50 TBM850s a year and although the company sees an international market for the airplane, most of its sales are in the U.S. where there’s enough wealth to support the $3.4 million sales price. What do you get for that? An honest, 300-knot airplane with sophisticated automation, a comfortable 1200-mile range and a cabin that seats four with flexible loading options that make it practical to carry large and heavy cargo, in addition to a couple of passengers. A recent additional pot sweetener is free maintenance on everything but consumables for a period of five years. If it sounds like Daher-SOCATA is confident in the reliability of the TBM850, they seem to be just that.