ATR identifies 209 potential turboprop routes in Indonesia

ATR, the Franco-Italian turboprop manufacturer, has published an analysis identifying 209 domestic routes across Indonesia that it considers commercially viable for regional turboprop aircraft. The company puts the combined market at roughly 16 million passengers a year, currently unserved by scheduled flights.

According to ATR, 70 of Indonesia's 180 paved-runway airports have no scheduled passenger service. That means new routes could be launched largely without fresh infrastructure spending.

The figures come from ATR's MobilityMonitor platform, which the manufacturer says tracked travel behaviour among 35 million Indonesian residents over a year, a sample it describes as representative of the wider population. That group made an estimated 780 million inter-city trips using cars, motorbikes, buses, ferries, trains and aircraft. About 90% of those journeys fell between 100 and 800 kilometres, a range ATR says suits turboprop operations well. ATR compiled its list of candidate routes by comparing common travel corridors against the existing airport network and scaling up the sample data.

The analysis suggests 88% of the potential routes, accounting for about 14 million passengers annually, would connect points within the same island rather than linking different islands. Ninety percent of the identified routes lie outside Java, spanning Sumatra, Sulawesi, Kalimantan, Papua and Maluku.

ATR attributes this to Indonesia's uneven transport infrastructure. Java holds about 58% of the country's motorway network despite covering only 7% of its land area, the company said, while Kalimantan, roughly four times larger, has just 5% of the motorway network.