The first step, flying-wise, was to go to SimCom in Orlando to learn how to fly a smelly-fuel pressurized speedster. It was an excellent experience. My instructor was very knowledgeable, took the time to thoroughly explain the answers to my questions, and I felt like he wanted me to succeed. I also had an excellent partner for the training who had just purchased his own TBM. SimCom has courses (and simulators) for many of the higher-performance types that some of you might fly - Barons, Twin Cessnas, Meridians, etc and I definitely recommend using them if they have a course for your airplane. Lots of things that you can do in the sim that can't be done safely in the airplane.
The initial course was a week long, with each day consisting of 4 hours of classroom time, 2 hours observing in the sim and two hours flying the sim. The classroom time included lots of systems knowledge, and reviews of accidents and incidents that might kill you, injure you, or cost you a LOT of money in a hurry.
My favorite part was learning about the PT-6. I've not paid a lot of attention to turbines before since they were always out of reach, and I didn't really understand a lot about the starting procedures and why they are how they are, etc. so that was really fun to learn.
A turbine engine is essentially a barely-controlled in-flight fire.
Temperature is important - That fire is hot enough that it can quickly cook the engine, melt parts, and lots of other Bad Stuff. And to keep the temperatures tolerable, you need airflow and lots of it.
So, the first step when starting is to get that airflow going. The starter spins the compressor section up to about 13% Ng (Ng is the speed of the gas generator/compressor section, 13% is about 4875 RPM) with no fuel so that the airflow that's present can keep the fire from touching any of those expensive parts. Airflow in the burner can keeps the fire in the middle of the can, so the airflow has to start first. Oil pressure should also rise here to lubricate things which are already moving pretty fast.
Once you hit that 13% or so Ng, you move the condition lever (looks and works kinda like the mixture but only has three positions that are used) from Idle Cut-Off to Low Idle, which introduces fuel and starts the fire - At least on the 850; on the 900 you move the single power lever from "4th gear" slightly forward. This is where Expensive Stuff can happen very quickly: The Inter-Turbine Temperature (ITT), basically the temp between the two halves of the engine, will climb rapidly at first, but as the engine's speed also increases when you light the fire, the airflow will increase and ITT should peak within limits and come back down. If it gets into the 800ºC range and is still moving upwards quickly (a hot start), you need to immediately stop the fuel flow and extinguish the fire to avoid cooking the engine.
However, if all is going well, the engine will reach 30% Ng (about 11,250 RPM in the compressor) in less than 30 seconds. Only half (14) of the fuel injectors have been operating to this point, and between 30 and 40% Ng, the second half will light up (or at least they'd better, otherwise you have a hung start, power won't increase, ITT will rise and you have to kill it). Once the secondaries light off, power comes up more quickly. At 52% Ng (about 19,500 RPM) the starter cuts off (in the 900, you have to manually switch it off in the 850), you'll see the speed stabilize, and you move the condition lever to high idle in the 850 or the single power lever to "left of neutral between 1st and 2nd gear" in the 900. (Can you tell I drove stick shift for many years?)
At that point, you should see Ng come up to 69% or so and you have a good start. Phew! Lots of stuff happens fast, and it happens too fast to talk through it with an instructor, so it was good that they always had us go through the full procedure to power up the aircraft and the engine during every sim session, as well as the full shutdown afterwards.
I managed to do some dumb stuff in the sim that was still fun... Like accidentally take off at 40% power. You normally push the throttle to 40% torque, check the gauges, and then push it up to 90% for takeoff (Ram air will take it up to about 98% as you accelerate down the runway). Early on when I was still a bit overwhelmed with a lot of new stuff happening quickly, I forgot to give it the second push. Turbines have a lot of power, so it just motored on down the runway and still took off quickly enough that I didn't notice until just after I pulled the gear handle up.
Over the course of the week, I did 3 sim sessions in the 850 sim, and two more in the 930 sim to get used to the single power lever configuration of the 900. The 930 sim was my first exposure to the G3000, which is really nice - If the G1000 is a GNS 430, the G3000 is a GTN 750, and that's how each of them work too. My familiarity with the GTN 750 in my Mooney made the G3000 a piece of cake. The 3000 also allows you to split every screen, so each of the PFDs can have both a PFD and an MFD display simultaneously, and the middle MFD screen can have two different pages displaying as well. That would be really nice sometimes, for displaying NEXRAD next to on-board weather radar, for example.
In the various sim sessions, all kinds of things were thrown at us. Basically, every type of bad engine start (wet, hot, hung, fuel and/or oil pressure problems, etc), in-flight engine failures from immediately after takeoff all the way up to the mid-teens, fuel control unit failures, and quite a variety of emergency situations. Generally, the things that were thrown at us in a particular sim session usually involved the systems we had learned about in the previous classroom session, and we progressed to more complicated failures later in the week.
Finally, after successfully completing the training at SimCom, it was time to head home and start flying!
