Two drawings become one

On 4 November 1981, in Paris, two chairmen signed a cooperation agreement that merged two half-finished ideas. Aeritalia’s Renato Bonifacio brought the AIT 230 regional airliner study; Aérospatiale’s Jacques Mitterrand, brother of the newly elected French president, brought the AS 35. Neither company had felt able to go alone. Together, as a groupement d’intérêt économique under French law, they created ATR, Avions de Transport Régional in French and Aerei da Trasporto Regionale in Italian. The letters work in both languages. More than four decades later the arrangement is unchanged: one company, two owners, exactly 50 per cent each, now Airbus and Leonardo.

Half the fuel

The pitch was brutally simple: fuel. The consortium promised an airliner burning about 430 kg over a 370 km sector, nearly half what its 40–50 seat rivals, the HS.748 and Fokker F.27, needed. The ATR 42 first flew from Toulouse on 16 August 1984. On 3 December 1985 the first production aircraft went to Air Littoral, and in January 1986 ATR launched a stretch, the ATR 72, which flew on 27 October 1988 and entered service with Finnair a year later. Because the two share a line and most of their systems, each has kept the other alive. By 2015 the ATR 42 was the only 50-seat regional aircraft still in production anywhere.

The bet on propellers

The work is split the European way. Leonardo builds fuselages and tails at Pomigliano d’Arco near Naples; Airbus builds wings near Bordeaux; final assembly and delivery happen at Toulouse. For a while it looked like a losing bet. From the late 1990s to about 2005 cheap fuel made regional jets the fashion, and French Wikipedia records that ATR was threatened with closure. Fokker and Dornier left the market. Then oil prices rose, and the quieter -500 series, with six-bladed propellers, made the turboprop respectable again. ATR came back with a vengeance: in 2011 it sold 157 aircraft, and on 3 May 2012 it delivered its 1,000th, to Air Nostrum.

Every eight seconds

By 2018, by ATR’s own reckoning, an ATR took off or landed somewhere every eight seconds. The fleet had flown 30 million flights for around 200 airlines in nearly 100 countries, and ATR claimed a 75 per cent share of the turboprop airliner market since 2010. The 1,500th aircraft went to Japan Air Commuter that October, and the 1,700th was delivered on 26 August 2024. FedEx bought freighters, Iran Air ordered 40 before American sanctions froze seven of them in storage, and navies discovered the airframe too: Italy flies the P-72A maritime patrol aircraft, Turkey an armed anti-submarine version converted with TAI.

Ice

The ATR’s darkest chapter is written in ice. On 31 October 1994 American Eagle Flight 4184 crashed near Roselawn, Indiana, after icing caused a loss of control, killing all 68 aboard, the type’s first fatal accident. The crash and the rise of regional jets drove ATR out of the US mainland market until 2017. Five of the 13 fatal ATR 72 accidents counted to August 2024 involved icing conditions, the most recent the Voepass crash in Brazil that killed 62. The deadliest, Yeti Airlines Flight 691 at Pokhara in January 2023, killed 72. TransAsia lost two aircraft in seven months in 2014–2015, one filmed cartwheeling into the Keelung river in Taipei.

Hybrid dreams, short runways

ATR has repeatedly flirted with something bigger, a 90-seat stretch or a clean-sheet 100-seater, and repeatedly backed away; Leonardo abandoned the 100-seater idea in 2018. In 2022 it flew an ATR on 100 per cent sustainable aviation fuel and began studying the hybrid-electric EVO, a decision since postponed. In November 2024 it scrapped the ATR 42-600S, designed for runways of just 800 metres. Under chief executive Nathalie Tarnaud Laude, 2025 brought only 32 deliveries against parts shortages, but revenue of US$1.2 billion and a backlog of more than 160. She said the company did not measure the success of a transition year on one number.

Factories

• Toulouse final assembly line · Saint-Martin-du-Touch, Toulouse — Final assembly, flight test and delivery
• Pomigliano d’Arco · near Naples, Italy — Leonardo builds fuselage and tail sections
• Airbus Atlantic, Mérignac · near Bordeaux — Wing assembly

People

• Jacques Mitterrand · chairman of Aérospatiale — Younger brother of President François Mitterrand; Aerospatiale chief 1975–1983; signed the founding agreement in 1981
• Renato Bonifacio · chairman of Aeritalia — Signed the founding agreement in 1981
• Christian Scherer · CEO 2016–2018 — Left to become Airbus chief commercial officer
• Stefano Bortoli · CEO 2018–2022
• Nathalie Tarnaud Laude · CEO since 2022 — Formerly head of the NH90 programme

Records and firsts

• ATR 42: by 2015 the only 50-seat regional airliner still in production
• First 100 per cent SAF flight by a regional aircraft, 21 June 2022