John Bogdasarian has been in the real estate industry for 28 years and has been an aircraft owner for almost five years. Early in his career, he needed to drive frequently between his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a job site in South Bend, Indiana. These road trips began to wear on him, and Bogdasarian wondered how to make them less painful.
Of course, aviation was the logical choice, and the private equity company president began flight training in earnest. He advised that he was ready for his checkride when his first daughter was born.
“I decided that I didn’t have the time to put into it anymore, and certainly didn’t have the funds at the time to buy an airplane. In addition to that, I was flying a really old rental aircraft, which made me nervous. I probably had about a hundred hours, 30 of which were solo, before I put flying on pause,” he said.
“Fast forward to COVID, when everyone was on lockdown, and I had nothing to do. It looked like it was going to stay that way for a while, and I was in a different financial position. So, I bought a Cessna 182 with Garmin G1000 NXi and hired an instructor full-time. I got my license in about three months and then bought a Bonanza, which had the same avionics that the 182 had.”
Bogdasarian was excited to begin flying the new-to-him, high-performance aircraft, but was aware of the risks as a low-time pilot and began working towards an
instrument rating. The Bonanza was a nice step up from the 182, but Bogdasarian knew that his next step was going to be more of a leap. And so, he gained a higher ceiling, more range, and a lot more speed.
“My buddy Phil Bozak has a TBM 900, which is actually a couple of serials off from the one I have now. He was instrumental in getting me into this aircraft, and I had flown with him a number of times for various things. So, I always had my eye on a TBM but wasn’t sure I’d ever get there,” he said.
“After a couple of years owning the Bonanza, I upgraded to the TBM 900. This is a dream aircraft. Flying it is like time-traveling, and you’re over most weather. If you can’t get over it, you can get around it pretty easily. Insurance costs and other expenses go up every time you upgrade, but one thing that I don’t know if people really think about is the safety perspective. And when moving up, you gain more and more capabilities. The TBM checks all the boxes for my missions and is a very capable plane.”
Bogdasarian purchased his aircraft, equipped with G1000 NXi and the pilot door upgrade, in April of 2024, right after it came out of its 10-year inspection. He estimates logging about 200 hours a year, with trip lengths varying from half an hour to an occasional three- or four-hour-long flight. Some of the most labor-intensive times that Bogdasarian has flown in the plane were during training.
“It’s funny that insurance is all based on hours. I can sit in the plane for four hours, or I can fly it for one – when the takeoff, touchdown, and [high-intensity tasks] happen. When I first got the plane, insurance required 40 hours of in-aircraft training. I flew with an instructor pilot from Goldberg Aviation, and we spent a week flying all over the country. It was super fun, and I probably did more than what was required because it was fun, and you don’t want to do something stupid with the plane.”
Outside of becoming acquainted with a different cockpit and systems, the TBM has some nuances that must be learned.
“It’s a big, fast plane. I think I had a 50% go-around rate during my first 50 hours in the plane, since it was such a different animal from landing a Bonanza. You are going so fast when coming in to land, and it’s hard to get the thing slow enough, down to around 110 knots. The stall speed configured is 61 or 62 knots, so you can fly it almost as slow as a Bonanza, but on final, you should be at 85 knots over the fence. I was constantly at 100 or 110,” he said.
“And with that much speed and power in the plane, it just doesn’t settle down. You start floating, floating, floating, and if you try to do any kind of flare at all, you just balloon up. At that point, you just go around and do it over again. Even after my training, I was still having to go around a lot, and I called Phil [Bozak] so we could go fly in the pattern together. What I realized was that I was leaving too much torque in when I was 50 feet off the ground. You really can almost pull it to flight idle at that point, or close to it.”
Prop clearance at touchdown is of the utmost concern to pilots, and there are visual cues to make sure you are on the right track when landing.
“There’s a great article out there (TBM Technique: Landing in Style, AOPA-January 2021), where they actually had a contest [among TBM pilots] for who could hit the numbers and make sure you’re five degrees nose up when touching down to avoid prop strikes. So, if I have someone with me, which oftentimes I do, I have them watch the screen. My eyes are outside at that point on final, and you’re looking down at the end of the runway. I’d say it’s more of a feel play, and doing it correctly, you can be pretty high nose up when you touch down. I mean, it’s just if you’ve got too much power in that’s where the problem is. A lot of people start pushing the nose down to try and get the plane down. And really, you have to land it more like an airliner, where you’re just kind of coming in nose high and letting the sink rate get you down there. Then there is no flare. You just hit ground effect and land.”
An oftentimes macabre source of these important knowledge points is post-accident investigation reports, where you can learn a lot of the model-specific “do’s and don’ts.” Learning from these, Bogdasarian continues to refine his own personal limitations and standard operating procedures. Personally, he doesn’t fly in the winter down through icing conditions when it’s freezing at ground level (and referenced a March 2025 crash in Minnesota of a TBM 700) and feels most sharp when flying at least every ten days. If he doesn’t have an existing flight lined up when starting to feel rusty, he will fly to visit family or find another “excuse” to do something more than just flying aimlessly in the pattern.
Bogdasarian advised that the TBM ownership group is tight-knit and willing to help one another with more than just the operating nuances of the French-built airframe.
“Leaning on the TBM owner groups that are out there on Facebook has been beneficial. Chris Osborne, who is just across the river from me in Canada, flies back and forth from the Turks and Caicos regularly. When I was planning my first international trip, I posted asking whether anyone had made that trip before. He got back to me right away and gave me a checklist and the routes that would probably happen, the different points, and where I’d have to circle depending on when I arrived,” he said.
“It’s only one way in, one way out because there is no taxiway. The airliners don’t start getting in until like one or so in the afternoon, until about five. He told me that if you get there by 12:30, you’ll be the first one in line and not have to worry about circling around a fixed point [waiting for the airliners to land]. And the first time when I went there, I was on final when I heard someone having to do a holding pattern out over the ocean.”
Bogdasarian flies both for fun and in support of his real estate investment business, Promanas. The TBM 900 is a competitive asset, allowing the team to easily reach in-work developments or potential acquisitions at a moment’s notice.
“Right now, we are doing a big project in Nashville, so I’m back and forth from John Tune a lot. The flight is maybe an hour and a half, start to finish. I can go at a moment’s notice, and that’s super helpful,” he said.
“I would say my primary mission outside of work is flying my boys around to sports tournaments. They play golf out of Sea Island, Georgia, the Carolinas, and all over the place. Next week, they have a four-day travel baseball tournament in Omaha. It would be a ten-hour drive in a car, or an hour and forty-five minutes in the TBM. Flying allows me to be able to get there with them, while still being able to hop over to Nashville for a day for work.”
Nearly a year and a half into owning the TBM, there really isn’t anything that Bogdasarian would change about the aircraft. As a fan of the University of Michigan athletics teams, there is actually one thing.
“I think the only thing that I’m unhappy about is the color of my plane. It looks like the Ohio State Buckeyes team airplane, with scarlet and gray paint. Being in Ann Arbor, I am joking, but at the same time I’m not, it was the only thing that gave me pause,” he recalled. “But look, I got to say, the plane runs like a well-oiled Urban Meyer machine. So, if that’s the price I have to pay, that’s fine. If I can get it painted at some point in time, I’d like to get the interior refreshed as well. But I don’t think I can have it down for a month to six weeks to get that work done.”
