ATR chief targets 40-plus deliveries in 2023 as ‘recovery on track’

Twelve months into her four-year mandate as ATR’s first female chief executive, Nathalie Tarnaud Laude maintains the Toulouse-based airframer’s recovery is “on track” and that it will deliver at least 40 aircraft this year, after shipping 20 units in the first eight months. ATR has also taken 22 firm orders in 2023 – including deals with Azul, Berjaya Air, and Mandarin Airlines announced at June’s Paris air show. With “more in the pipeline”, Laude says she is confident of achieving a book to bill ratio of 1:1 this year, as well as restoring ATR to profitability for the first time since the Covid-19 crisis. It follows a dismal 2022 in which the Airbus/Leonardo joint venture delivered just 25 aircraft and notched up 26 orders, around half the figure its shareholders had been banking on when the industry began to emerge from the effects of the pandemic late the previous year. Speaking to FlightGlobal at the regional turboprop manufacturer’s Blagnac campus, Laude, who took over in September last year, says her “focus has been to rebuild after Covid”, and that she has been “encouraged by the wonderful engagement and levels of motivation from all the employees in this company”. She blames ATR’s poor 2022 performance largely on “a tough [supply chain] environment”, which she expects to continue into 2024. “It wasn’t so much a problem with demand,” she says, although she admits ATR customers tend to commit to purchases only 24 months ahead of an expected delivery. She adds that other encouraging signals are that fleet utilisation is back to 2019 levels, with just under 1,200 ATRs in operation, and a 160-strong backlog. A glut of used examples on the market – something that hampered new aircraft sales during 2022 – has also “dried up”, she says. Her target is to bring annual production back up to 80 – the level ATR enjoyed through much of the 2010s – by the “second half of the decade”, and to take the book to bill ratio “well above” 1:1. “That clearly means we will need to sell more,” she remarks. ATR will restart a 400h flight test campaign for its short take-off and landing (STOL) version of the ATR 42-600, after an initial sortie in May last year. It follows the installation of a larger rudder, built by Leonardo. The certification target is now June 2025, slightly later than previously suggested. ATR has 21 orders for the variant, but Laude expects more to follow once the certification schedule is confirmed. The company is targeting sales to airlines that use short airfields in mountainous and island regions. This includes Japan where Laude says there are 10 airports inaccessible to all but the smallest passenger aircraft. “With this variant we can really bring more connectivity to communities that have little or no air access,” she says.<br/>