ATR is set to announce new customers this week that would take the order tally for its family of twin turboprop regional airliners past the 1,500 mark. Here at the Paris Air Show, the Toulouse-based airframer will unveil new options including a passenger/freight combi version of the ATR72-600, and a new Smart galley as part of its latest Armonia cabin design.
By year-end, Papua New Guinea-based Airlines PNG is due to take delivery of the first of the new ATR72-600 Combi models, featuring four freight containers towards the front of the aircraft and 44 passenger seats in the rear. The design also will be offered for retrofit on existing aircraft.
“It has been developed to compete with other new turboprop’s combined configurations,” explained ATR vice president Thierry Casale at a press briefing in Toulouse last week. In his view, the new option is ideal for intra-island operations since “it doubles the available cargo space with the need to modify the aircraft’s baseline configuration.”
The new Smart galley will be offered as standard on ATRs, and deliveries of aircraft equipped with it should start in 2016, following certification. According to Casale, the new unit will be more flexible for operators.
With rising orders, ATR’s main challenge continues to be ramping up production rates. This is positive problem to have a decade on from 2004, when the joint venture between Airbus and Finmeccanica produced a meager six aircraft. It believes that rising fuel costs over this period significantly changed the appeal of turboprop aircraft, although this trend has been markedly reversed this year due to falling crude oil prices.
The manufacturer, which makes the 50-seat ATR42-600 and 70-seat ATR72-600, now has a backlog of 300 aircraft and is preparing to deliver 90 this year and 100 in 2016. In 2014, it achieved revenues of around $1.8 billion, having delivered 83 aircraft.
Increased demand has prompted ATR to make changes to increase the size of its final assembly line in Toulouse to 30,000 square meters, compared with just 8,000 square meters eight years ago. In Toulouse, ATR wings made in Bordeaux are attached to the fuselages made in Pomigliano d’Arco, Italy by Alenia Aermacchi, before the cabin interiors and cockpit avionics are fitted.
The ATR turboprops are then painted by a local Airbus contractor or, in some cases, are flown to another paint shop at Châteauroux in central France. In total, each ATR takes 10 months to make, with the last 10 weeks or so being spent in Toulouse. The company has also improved its delivery facilities.
According to Tom Anderson, ATR’s new vice president for commercial and support, the next decade will bring continued success. “I think we have been conservative with the forecast as there is a large replacement market in the U.S. and a new market for us in China and India,” he told reporters on June 5.
ATR’s more recent forecast sees 2,500 new regional airliner sales over the next 20 years. The manufacturer wants to ramp up production to a rate of 120 aircraft per year and has the option to expand its facilities on space currently controlled by Airbus.
CleanSky Roof
Meanwhile, ATR is preparing for the first flight of a new ATR72-600 demonstrator featuring a weight-saving carbon fiber roof developed by Alenia Aermacchi. This work is being done under the auspices of the European Commission’s CleanSky program to reduce the environmental impact of air transport. Structural testing is expected to take three to four weeks, with the new roof being monitored inflight through fiber optic sensors.
Later this year, ATR will conduct a second series of tests to evaluate a new electrically powered air conditioning system that it hopes will be 10 percent more fuel-efficient.
ATR has invested around $12 million in CleanSky development work since 2008. The program also has European Commission funding and its overall goal is to halve carbon dioxide emissions from aircraft by 2020.
