Ed 
I’m going to own an airplane.
Not someday-maybe, not in a vague the-way-people-say-they’ll-write-a-book way. I’ve been a pilot for 12 years. I took my first flight lesson when I was about 10 years old, hands on the yoke, feet on the rudders, barely tall enough to see over the panel. The flying isn’t the dream. The flying I already do. The dream is the airplane. And I’m writing it down in public on purpose, because I’ve come to believe you have to say the thing out loud before the world can hand it to you. So here it is. The world is now on notice.
It’s one of two airplanes. I go back and forth, and I’d happily lose sleep over the choice.
Contender one: the Pilatus PC-12 PRO. If you don’t know Pilatus, they’re the Swiss outfit that builds the airplane every other single-engine turboprop gets measured against. The brand-new PRO is the latest version: one big reliable turbine up front, pressurized, flies above the weather, and a cabin lifted straight out of their PC-24 jet, full-grain leather, room for the whole family and all the gear, and a cargo door you could load a dirt bike through. It’ll do about 290 knots and fly nearly 1,800 nautical miles without stopping. And here’s the part I love: it’ll do all that and still land on a short grass strip in the middle of nowhere. It’s the Swiss Army knife. The do-anything, go-anywhere machine. The SUV of the sky.
Contender two: the Daher TBM 960. This is the French one, and it’s the sports car. Same idea, single turbine, pressurized, flies in the flight levels, but where the Pilatus is about space and ruggedness, the TBM is about speed. It’ll cruise at 330 knots. That’s faster than some jets. It’s sleeker, lower-slung, the kind of airplane that looks fast sitting still. You give up some cabin to get there, but my god, you get there quick.
Van versus rocket. Versatility versus velocity. I genuinely don’t know yet, and that’s part of the fun.
Here’s why, though, because the why matters more than the spec sheet. I’ve chased the horizon my whole life. As a kid it was the water and the sky both, I’d get on any boat that would have me, and I was taking flight lessons before I was tall enough to fly properly. The pull never went away. An airplane like this isn’t about showing off. It’s about range, the human kind. It’s Austin to the coast for lunch. It’s the whole family in one airplane, no terminal, no taking your shoes off, no middle seat, gone before the kids get bored. It’s time, the one thing you can’t buy more of, except that a fast airplane is about the closest thing there is to buying it.
So that’s the goal. PC-12 PRO or TBM 960. A pressurized single-engine turboprop, in a hangar, with a tail number I’ve already picked out.
N4ED.
Look at it for a second. Four Ed. For Ed. Right now it’s held in reserve by one of those brokers who snap up the good short tail numbers, which means it’s not on anyone’s airplane yet, and it can be had. I already know whose it’s going to be. I don’t know the exact year, and I don’t know yet whether those letters get painted on a Pilatus or a TBM. But I know the tail number.
I’m putting all of it out there because goals you keep secret are just daydreams, and daydreams don’t get funded. This one’s getting funded. I already fly. The airplane is coming. The tail number is picked. Now it’s just the work.
The world knows what I’m building toward now, and it knows where to find me. November-Four-Echo-Delta.
Your move, world.
— Ed
