  We discuss the Gaia Data Release 1 (September 2016) and preliminary work on
maximising the benefit for cool white dwarf (WD) science in advance of the full
parallax catalogue which will appear around one year later in DR2. The Tycho
catalogue is used in conjunction with the all-sky ground based
astrometric/photometric SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey in order to identify candidate
faint common proper motion objects to the Tycho stars. Gaia DR1 is supplemented
by the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution catalogue containing some 2 million
parallaxes with Hipparcos-like precision for Tycho stars. While hotter,
brighter WDs are present in Tycho, cooler examples are much rarer (if present
at all) and CPM offers one method to infer precision distances for a
statistically useful sample of these very faint WDs.
