Daher-Socata said it has delivered its sixteenth TBM 850 of the year. The airplane, the latest, Elite variant of the TBM 850 series, will go to a customer in Thailand. According to Daher-Socata, the customer previously owned a Cirrus.
“It was a matter of a telephone call,” said Michel Adam de Villiers, vice president of sales at Daher-Socata North America. “He just said ‘I want the airplane,’ we went to Thailand, and then he signed the contract in February.” To date, 20 orders for the Elite have been placed. The airplane was introduced at this year’s Sun ‘n Fun International Fly-In and Expo.
The Elite lets customers reconfigure the TBM 850 cabin into a four- or six-seat layout. In the four-seat setup, the middle seats are retained and the aft seats removed. This opens up a large area for cargo, which can be held by netting secured to special attach points. The conversion to the four-seat, cargo configuration takes just 30 minutes to perform. All new TBM 850s have this capability as a standard feature.
However, two new avionics options are available on the Elite versions: a Honeywell-Bendix/King KHF 1050 HF radio, and Garmin’s GSR 56 Iridium satellite transceiver. The GSR lets customers receive on-demand weather and text/voice communications worldwide. Base price of the TBM 850 Elite is $3.4 million; with the optional pilot door, price jumps to $3.5 million.
