Franco-Italian turboprop manufacturer ATR has identified 209 new domestic air routes across Indonesia that it says could be economically viable, pointing to an untapped market of roughly 16 million passengers a year, the company said in a report cited by Aero Time.

ATR said 70 of Indonesia's 180 paved-runway airports currently have no scheduled passenger service, leaving room for new domestic routes without major infrastructure investment.

The findings are based on ATR's MobilityMonitor platform, which tracked travel patterns of 35 million Indonesian residents, a sample the company describes as representative of the wider population, Aero Time reported. That group made about 780 million inter-city journeys over a year using cars, motorbikes, buses, ferries, trains, and planes.

Around 90 percent of those journeys covered distances of 100 to 800 kilometres, a range ATR says suits turboprop aircraft. ATR arrived at its list of 209 potential air routes by cross-referencing common travel routes with the existing airport network and scaling the sample data to estimate the total market size, the report said.

Outer islands identified as main beneficiaries

According to the data, 88 percent of the potential routes, accounting for about 14 million passengers annually, are intra-island connections rather than inter-island routes. Ninety percent of the identified routes are on islands other than Java, including Sumatra, Sulawesi, Kalimantan, Papua, and Maluku, Aero Time said.

The imbalance reflects Indonesia's uneven infrastructure. Java constitutes about 7 percent of the country's land area but contains roughly 58 percent of its motorway network, while Kalimantan, about four times larger than Java, has only around 5 percent of the country's motorways, the report noted.

Average surface travel speeds in Java reach around 65 kilometres per hour, while speeds elsewhere in the archipelago range between 26 and 37 kilometres per hour, ATR's data showed. Distances on the outer islands often exceed 350 kilometres and reach nearly 480 kilometres in parts of Papua.

Sumatra, Sulawesi seen as top opportunities

ATR identified Sumatra and Sulawesi as the largest potential markets for regional aviation, citing strong demand across a wide range of new city-pair connections.

The company cited the Bengkulu-Pekanbaru route in Sumatra as an example, where a road journey can take more than 18 hours compared with about one hour by direct flight. ATR estimates demand on that corridor could support two daily flights.

"The demand is there, as is the airport infrastructure. What is needed now is the right aircraft," said Alexis Vidal, ATR's senior vice-president for commercial.

Vidal said MobilityMonitor also highlighted uneven mobility across the Indonesian archipelago, adding that regional air services could help narrow that gap. "By connecting communities across the archipelago using regional air services, it will help to drive economic growth, provide greater access to essential services and create more opportunities for people," he said.

Source: Aero Time