ATR 42/72 — safety record, routes and airlines

The ATR 42/72 has 61 occurrences in our most recent five-year window — a volume that reflects how widely it flies, not how dangerous it is, so we do not publish a single safety score for it. It has 36 hull losses and 386 recorded occurrences in total. See the methodology page for how the record is summarized.

Size. The ATR 42 seats about 48 passengers and the ATR 72 seats 70 to 78. They share a common type rating, so pilots can fly both with minimal differences training. Most fleets prefer the larger ATR 72 for per-seat economics, but the ATR 42 remains useful on very thin routes or airports with limited infrastructure where a smaller airframe is required.

Cabin is 2-2 seating with no middle seats, noise from the propellers is higher than a jet though newer aircraft have noise insulation, and flight times are short, usually under 90 minutes. Overhead bins are small, so roller bags typically get gate-checked. The aircraft handles short runways well and can operate into airports that would not accept a regional jet at maximum payload.

Fuel burn per seat on routes under 400 nautical miles is the lowest of any regional aircraft in production. Block times on short sectors are comparable to regional jets once you include climb and descent time. Turboprops also handle short runways, hot-and-high airports, and unpaved strips better than equivalent jets, which keeps them irreplaceable on many island, developing-country, and remote regional networks.