Daher Turboprop’s Brisk Sales Help Broader Aerostructures Master Plan

The TBM 980, the latest iteration of Daher’s turboprop single, is seeing sustained demand and may remain a flagship for sales to the broader market.

When Airbus precursor EADS chose Daher to take over its aerostructures subsidiary Socata in 2008, EADS executives believed the company would not be interested in the small business aircraft Socata had produced since the early 1990s. “We were told that was an old design with little future,” Daher Chairman and CEO Didier Kayat recalls. “They said we could sell the TBM aircraft program to another company they had in mind.”

• Daher unveils TBM 980 with Garmin P3000 Prime avionics
• The company’s airframer status supports its marketing strategy as an Airbus and Boeing supplier

That was not how Daher saw the program’s future. It marketed the TBM as a vintage aircraft design comparable to a Porsche 911, and the TBM series eventually took a more significant place in Daher’s strategy. Compared to aerostructures’ dominant (albeit undisclosed) share in Daher’s €1.8 billion ($2.1 billion) total revenue in 2024, the turboprop’s €250 million contribution is small, but it has been a driving factor for the company’s growth in aerospace.

Airbus has been a longtime and crucial Daher customer, particularly for the A350’s main landing gear doors. When Daher looked for more component manufacturing business, being an airframer lent it credibility. The company secured work on the main landing gear doors on Gulfstream G500 and G600 business jets and then for winglets on the larger G700, unveiled in 2020.

“Gulfstream told us we have this culture of customer service in business aviation,” Kayat said in 2023. “They found that was a strong point.” The deals marked progress in Daher’s strategy to diversify and increase the share of U.S. contracts in its revenue.

Running a final assembly line for the TBM might help Daher understand customer needs in its manufacturing services business, where it offers logistics. In addition, with the ongoing production ramp-up, OEMs are outsourcing more work; Daher employees are installing cabin interiors on Airbus’ A350 final assembly line in Toulouse.

The TBM program’s recent history has not been without challenges, including supply chain problems similar to those faced by larger airframers. Daher delivered 51 TBM 960s (the earlier version) in 2025, down from 56 the year before. “In 2025, we wanted to deliver more,” Daher Aircraft CEO Nicolas Chabbert said at the TBM 980’s unveiling event Jan. 15 in Tarbes, France. He listed supply of Pratt & Whitney Canada engines among the obstacles to more deliveries.

Capacity at the Tarbes factory stands at around 60 TBMs per year, and Daher is creating an additional final assembly line at its site in Stuart, Florida. From 2027, the production facility will be able to put together TBMs and Kodiaks, the small utility turboprop program acquired from Quest Aircraft in 2019. In 2022, Daher took over the Stuart site from Triumph for its production of large, complex metallic and composite aerostructures, including ailerons for the Boeing 777.

Daher has stumbled in anticipating the medium-term evolution of the small business aircraft market. In the early 2020s, company executives decided to invest—like Airbus and Safran—in the Ecopulse hybrid-electric distributed propulsion demonstrator. They expected it could create a basis for developing the TBM or Kodiak and help the company understand the needs of future commercial aircraft. In fact, the program showed that batteries were still too heavy and would remain so in the coming years.

Meanwhile, the strategy of making frequent product updates to keep the TBM attractive has worked. The TBM 980’s pilot-machine interface relies on the full-touchscreen Garmin G3000 Prime avionics suite. More than 25 customers ordered TBM 980s without knowing what the upgrade was about, Chabbert said. Daher engineers had to dedicate half of the new version’s 200 flight-test hours to ensuring the G3000 Prime could accommodate all previously added features, test pilot Guillaume Remigi said.

Daher’s integration of the G3000 Prime could herald the next generation of commercial aircraft flight decks. The G3000 Prime enables pilots to configure the three displays however they find clearest and quickest to use and to choose a preset layout for a given flight phase. “The time a pilot does not spend reconfiguring displays or searching in menus is time saved to manage a problem,” Chabbert said. On the crew alerting system, failures appear in order of priority. Pilots can tap a line to pop up a related checklist, then scroll down and check items.