Hello everybody! x) Very soon, in the end of January, I am flying to Georgia with a propeller passage plane. This will be my first trip with a propeller plane. How many of you have already flown with such an aircraft? How different is a trip by a propeller aircraft from a trip by a non-propeller plane? All I managed to find out is that propeller planes are always very small and that is. But what else could be said from your own experiences? Are they safer than non-propeller planes? Are they faster / slower? Do they fly higher / lower than non-propeller aircrafts? Do they make more noise? Are safety instructions before a flight the same as those in a non-propeller plane? Can one expect free food during a flight? And so no and so on. Every experience will be very interesting to me x) By the way, the propeller plane I am taking is of ‘Aerosvit Airlines’. I tried to search for photos of ‘Aerosvit’ propeller planes but Google has given me only one photo of an ‘Aerosvit’ propeller plane. Maybe you have your own photos (outside a plane / inside) of a propeller aircraft? I would appreciate if you could share them with me x)
Hey,
The only propeller aircraft they have is an ATR 72 which is a twin-engine turboprop short-haul regional airliner built by the French-Italian aircraft manufacturer ATR. ATR and Airbus are both built in Toulouse, and share resources and technology. It seats up to 78 passengers in a single-class configuration and is operated by a two-pilot crew.
Best regards
Flyvertosset
Gravity always wins!
Thank you very much for the information! Have you ever tried such an aircraft by yourself? Still, it is a bit strange since google photos of ATR 72 show a rather big plane and i expected a bit smaller one but if it holds up to 78 passages, than maybe it's possilbe x)
Hi,
I have been on a propeller planes for I guess 4 flights before. When I was a kid we used to have a flight in one of the provinces in Philippines and the only plane in there is a propeller plane. There are less than a hundred passenger in the plane and the experience was nerve wracking especially there is a turbulence. Hehehe... I could not forget that experience....
Both the propeller planes and the jets have the same type of engine, a gas-turbine engine, which is extremely reliable compared to the piston engines used on older airliners (and still used on small airplanes today). The only difference is that, on large jets, the thrust is provided mainly by a very large fan contained inside a cowling (the fan you see turning inside the engine), whereas on smaller airplanes, the engine turns an open propeller through a gearbox. The engines on big jets are called turbofans. The engines on smaller airplanes are called turboprops. Turboprops are more efficient than turbofans for low-speed flight in smaller airplanes, which is why they are used for those planes. They are almost as reliable as the turbofans on the big jets, and they are many times more reliable than airplanes with propellers driven by piston engines. There's nothing particularly old-fashioned about propellers. It's just that big airliners fly at high speeds and altitudes where a turbofan engine works better. The big fan inside a turbofan engine really isn't much more than an enclosed propeller with a great many blades. The enclosed fan gives better performance at speeds approaching the speed of sound, which are the usual cruising speeds for big airliners. Smaller airplanes fly only about half as fast, and at slightly lower altitudes, and so a turboprop is a better choice. In any case, don't confuse the turboprops with old-fashioned airliners from decades ago that actually used huge piston engines to turn the propellers. Those are indeed obsolete. Piston engines are only used on small private airplanes, mainly because they are cheaper (but they are also a lot less reliable than gas-turbine engines, which makes them undesirable for commercial transport aircraft). Statistically, the big jets are safer than the smaller turboprops, but that isn't just a consequence of the type of engine, it's also related to other things, such as less experienced pilots, slightly greater vulnerability to weather problems, less advanced avionics systems, etc. The smaller turboprops are often operated by regional or commuter airlines that are subcontracted by big airlines, and these smaller airlines are not always held to the same safety standards as the big airlines.
Thanks