Fly91, the Goa-headquartered regional carrier, has placed a firm order for 40 ATR 72-600s, taking its potential future fleet to over 40 aircraft. The order, reported to be close to finalisation for days before being confirmed, is the largest single commitment to ATR turboprops by an Indian regional operator and comes at a moment when Fly91’s existing fleet stands at just six aircraft. If every delivery happens, Fly91 would operate more ATR aircraft than any Indian carrier, a remarkable jump for an airline that started with two leased turboprops less than two and a half years ago.
The order builds on a maintenance relationship that predates the airline’s first flight. Fly91 signed its original Global Maintenance Agreement (GMA) with ATR in May 2024, when its fleet stood at two aircraft, and renewed it in January 2026 as an eight-year deal once utilisation crossed 2,500 flight hours per aircraft annually. That maintenance continuity, rather than a one-off transaction, has underpinned Fly91’s fleet growth so far, and the new order signals ATR’s confidence that the relationship can scale several times over. The order is also important for ATR which has made news in the past for a follow-on order from IndiGo, which hasn’t materialised. On the contrary, IndiGo’s ATR fleet has shrunk every quarter with the airline never operating full 50 planes at one go. For ATR, the order lands at a useful moment. The manufacturer closed 2025 with 60 gross orders and a backlog of over 160 aircraft, but flagged delivery shortfalls due to supply-chain disruption, and is targeting a 20% increase in deliveries in 2026. A large single-operator order from India, a market ATR has separately identified as needing 210 new turboprops by 2044, adds meaningful backlog depth from a market it has publicly bet on.
From two aircraft to a fleet-of-forty ambition
Fly91 commenced commercial operations on March 18, 2024, with a Goa–Bengaluru flight, starting with two leased ATR 72-600s sourced from Dubai Aerospace Enterprise. Even at launch, the airline’s stated ambition was to reach 30 aircraft within five years, a target repeated consistently across its press communications since. Growth has come steadily rather than in a single leap: a third aircraft arrived within weeks of launch, and the fleet reached four by early 2025, with the ATR GMA renewal in January 2026 noting two more aircraft arriving to take the total to six, where it stands today.
That fleet has supported a network built outward from Goa’s Manohar International Airport to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Sindhudurg, Agatti in Lakshadweep, Jalgaon, Pune and Solapur, largely under the UDAN regional connectivity scheme, with further destinations including Vijayawada, Rajahmundry, Tirupati coming up later with a base in Hyderabad.
IndiGo is already India’s largest ATR operator, and its experience is a cautionary tale
The bigger, and more relevant, comparison for Fly91’s ambitions isn’t Alliance Air, the government-owned UDAN operator with around 21 ATR 72-600s and ATR 42-600s. It’s IndiGo, which placed its own order for 50 ATR 72-600s back in 2017, took delivery of the last of them in early 2025, and today runs the biggest turboprop network of any Indian carrier. IndiGo’s ATR fleet dwarfs both Alliance Air’s and Fly91’s current size, and it is the clearest available precedent for what happens when a large ATR order actually gets delivered in India.
That precedent is not encouraging. IndiGo’s ATR deliveries took seven and a half years to complete, by far the slowest fleet type induction in the airline’s history, against a pace where it inducted more than 50 A320-family jets in 2024 alone. As of mid-2025, the ATR fleet made up about 15% of IndiGo’s total weekly departures but only around 2% of its capacity by available seat kilometres, a mismatch driven by short stage lengths and the ATR’s smaller cabin. The network has also proven less stable than IndiGo’s jet operations, with a materially higher rate of route changes and cancellations on ATR sectors than on the Airbus fleet, an indicator that many individual regional routes have not sustained themselves and have been tried, dropped and reshuffled repeatedly. Multiple Air Show cycles have come and gone with reported talks of a follow-on ATR order, and none have converted.
Slot access shapes where large ATR fleets can actually fly
IndiGo’s ATR network also illustrates the slot problem directly. Its heaviest ATR bases are Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai, airports with room to absorb high-frequency turboprop shuttle routes like Chennai–Madurai, flown eight times a day each way, alternating with Airbus operations seasonally. Mumbai, by contrast, remains entirely absent from IndiGo’s ATR map despite being one of India’s most slot-constrained airports, where a 78-seat turboprop competes for the same runway slot as a 220-plus-seat A321, an exchange rate no schedule planner would choose voluntarily. The airline started ATR operations from Navi Mumbai.
Fly91 has so far avoided this problem by design, building its network around Tier 2 and Tier 3 airports with spare capacity rather than competing for scarce slots at metros. But a 40-aircraft ambition, roughly comparable to IndiGo’s entire ATR fleet, cannot be sustained purely on routes like Jalgaon–Pune and Goa–Agatti. Scaling to that size will eventually require access to at least some larger, more congested airports for connecting traffic and aircraft utilisation to make sense, putting Fly91 on a collision course with the same slot economics that have kept IndiGo’s much larger ATR fleet out of Mumbai altogether.
Network Thoughts
Past and present ATR operators in India form a longer list than is often remembered: Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines both flew the type before folding, Alliance Air has operated it continuously as the government’s UDAN workhorse, and IndiGo, however reluctant it now seems about further expansion, remains by far the largest active operator. SpiceJet’s Q400s occupy a similar niche with a different aircraft type, though only one or two remain in active service. Fly91 is entering a market with real institutional memory of both turboprop success and turboprop strain, and IndiGo’s own order is the most important data point in that memory: a full order of 50 aircraft, delivered on schedule, that still left the operator with a network contributing barely a sliver of capacity relative to its footprint, a quicker cancellation cycle than the rest of the airline, and, ultimately, no appetite for a follow-on order years later.
Fly91 is a different kind of operator than IndiGo in one crucial respect: turboprops are its entire business rather than a small adjunct to a 400-plus jet fleet, so operational focus and crew planning around the ATR won’t compete internally with a much bigger narrowbody programme the way it likely does at IndiGo. But that same singular focus means Fly91 has none of IndiGo’s balance sheet or network scale to absorb underperforming routes while it finds its footing at 40 aircraft. Fly91 will compete with Star Air for fleet count to become the largest carrier by count in the regional space, though Star Air offers more seats per departure.
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