Air travel and the turboprop revival - Turbo aversion, turbo reversion

But now, even as regional airlines continue to phase out their older turboprops, a new generation of planes with propellers is taking off. ATR, a European maker of turboprops that is jointly owned by Airbus’s parent EADS and Finmeccanica of Italy, had a record year last year, winning firm orders for 157 planes and options for a further 79. Like Airbus and Boeing it now has an order book stretching years ahead. And like the bigger planemakers it is ramping up its output to meet the demand: in 2005, the turboprop’s darkest hour, ATR made just 15 of them. Last year it made 53, this year it is aiming to make more than 70, and in 2014 it wants to turn out 85.

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The reason for the turboprop revival is simple: the oil price. Filippo Bagnato, ATR’s boss, explains that the turnaround began when crude rose above $35 a barrel in the years following the Iraq war. Planes powered by jets are faster, but for flights of less than around 500 nautical miles, the shorter time spent in the air is insignificant compared with the fuel savings to be made by flying a slower turboprop. As it has become increasingly uneconomic to fly regional jets with fewer than around 70 seats, the turboprop has come to look like a better option. There seems little chance of oil going back down to the levels that had for a while made their fuel efficiency unimportant.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2012/02/air-travel-and-turboprop-revival