FLY91 has six aeroplanes. On Thursday it ordered forty more.

The Goa-based regional carrier signed a firm order for 40 ATR 72-600 turboprops at a ceremony in New Delhi on 3 September, in a deal valued at roughly $1 billion at list prices. It is the largest firm order ATR has taken in nearly a decade, and the biggest ever placed by a regional airline.

Deliveries run from 2027 to 2032. FLY91 says it expects its fleet to pass 60 aircraft within five years, which for an airline that started flying in 2024 is an aggressive number.

Why turboprops, and why now

India is the obvious market for this aircraft and has been for years. The country has an enormous number of Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities with airports that are either underused or unserved, connected by routes of 200 to 500 kilometres. That is a distance band where a regional jet burns money and a turboprop makes it.

An ATR 72-600 carries around 70 passengers, burns markedly less fuel than a comparable regional jet on a short sector, and can work from a shorter runway. On a 45-minute flight the jet’s speed advantage saves a handful of minutes and costs a great deal more per seat.

That is the whole commercial case, and the ATR chief executive made it more or less explicitly.

Six to sixty

The gap between where FLY91 is and where it says it will be is the interesting part of this story.

Going from six aircraft to more than sixty in five years is not a fleet plan, it is a bet on the entire regional segment in India expanding underneath you. It requires crews, engineers, slots, stands, and route economics that hold up once the initial subsidy and novelty wear off. Indian regional aviation has a long history of ambitious operators that did not survive contact with those constraints.

What is different here is the aircraft choice. A single-type turboprop fleet is about as simple as an airline can be: one set of type ratings, one spares pool, one maintenance programme, and an aircraft with a mature global support network. If you are going to scale fast, that is the least difficult way to do it.

Indian business coverage of the FLY91 order and what it means for regional aviation in India.

What it means for ATR

ATR has had a difficult decade. The turboprop market narrowed as fuel prices fell and regional jets and small narrowbodies pushed downwards, and the manufacturer’s order book thinned considerably compared with the boom years.

An order of this size, from a single airline, in the market that matters most to the aircraft, changes the shape of the backlog. It is the biggest firm deal the manufacturer has signed since IndiGo’s 50-aircraft order in 2017, and it comes at a moment when ATR is looking towards the next generation of the type.

The order was signed in the presence of India’s Civil Aviation Minister, Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu, which tells you the government considers regional connectivity a political priority as much as a commercial one.

Forty aeroplanes is a promise, not a fleet. The delivery stream starts in 2027, and the interesting question is whether the route network arrives with it.

Sources: ATR and FLY91 announcements; Aviation Week; The Tribune; Business Standard; AeroTime.