We Fly: Stepping Up in Style With Daher Aircraft TBM 980

Turboprop provides 330-knot performance, intuitive cockpit, and new long-distance travel performance.

Jonathan Welsh

Monday, August 17, 2026 at 08:00 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

Daher Aircraft TBM 980 [Credit: Airborne Films]

Key Takeaways:

The Daher TBM 980 is presented as an ideal "step-up" aircraft for high-performance piston pilots, offering significantly enhanced speed, climb rate, and payload capacity for ambitious, long-distance owner-flown missions.
It features a powerful yet smooth Pratt & Whitney turboprop engine with FADEC for simplified operation, along with cleaner preflight checks and precise ground handling.
The aircraft boasts an intuitive Garmin G3000 Prime avionics suite with three large touchscreens, designed to streamline information display and pilot interaction, eliminating traditional menu-scrolling.
Despite its substantial capabilities and advanced technology, the TBM 980 is described as stable and forgiving in flight, making it a manageable, albeit powerful, transition for experienced piston pilots.

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Long family trips for our sons’ far-flung sporting events, and a drawn-out move across several states to a new home combined over the past year to put me behind the wheel of the car more often than at the controls of an airplane. Still, as always, I spent much of my driving time thinking about flying. Mostly I considered how much sooner we would arrive at our destination if only we were airborne.

Flying from our old home in New Jersey to the new one in Vermont in Annie, our 1992 Commander 114B, takes less than two hours compared with at least five and a half in the car, avoiding all but the most necessary rest stops. From Vermont to Geneva, New York, to visit our younger son at school takes about an hour and 45 minutes versus seven hours driving. Vermont to Deer Isle, Maine, a favorite escape, is a shade over an hour in the airplane compared with a meandering five and a half hours behind the wheel—nearly all on backroads.