Originally Posted by
forgot to bid
ATR pilots from ASA like to say they burn the same amount of fuel on a given route in a 50 seat CRJ200 that they did in a 66 seat ATR-72.
A 100 seater that's as fuel efficient as a jet cruising in the low teens and without the maintenance issues of the Q400s will be a winner... imo. ATR is looking at it. Will passengers take it? They pay for bags now. They flew Dash 8s out of LGA for decades. I think they will.
Actually the ATR-72-212 burned about half the fuel of the CRJ200 (1,600PPH v/s 3,200) and also came with active noise reduction. The CRJ earned it back at altitude where it would routinely scoot along at .80 to .82 in the the days when time was considered more important than efficiency. So, for a 1/3 increase in speed you got a smaller airplane burning twice the fuel. The Dash 8 Q 400 is really a different animal. A lot more power and a lot more fuel burn.
Inside the ATR, it is an Airbus product. What appear to be the same bins, overhead panels, etc as the A320. Cockpit was also very "Airbus." It is wider than any of its regional jet competition.
On routes within the "400NM ring of death" where ATC commonly assigns flow control into major hubs, the ATR could be the FASTER airplane, since it operated in UN-congested airspace (10,000 to FL180). The ATR had runway data from anywhere and could often take off mid field if ATC needed separation for jets on the same RNAV departure.
ATR sold the airplanes with nice pamphlets explaining it was a thoroughly modern airplane which was much more environmentally friendly, bigger and more comfortable. Delta immediately had these removed (since they pointed out the drawbacks of the CRJ fleet Delta had just committed 11 Billion for)
The ATR-72's draw backs were its lack of power for hot, high, mountainous areas. We had to watch SE drift down numbers to get to Tennessee from Atlanta. You will never see that airplane out west. It's packs used to freeze up and block air flow. The un-intuitive trick was to run them full hot for a couple of minutes during the summer, melt the ice out, then go back cold. While melting, gobs of ice would get blown out into the distribution manifolds. A creative pilot could let the ice build behind their vent until they had a nice snowball, aim across the flight deck and try to score a direct hit on the other guy.
The ATR flew like an MD88 and had a similar number of mechanical idiosyncrasies. It was easy to load the thing aft CG and put it on its tail.