Air Caledonie ATR 72 Seat Map

Picking a Seat on Air Calédonie's ATR 72

Take 1A. It's one of only four seats on the aircraft with extra legroom, it sits ahead of the propeller line where a turboprop is at its quietest, and it's as far as you can get from the rear galley, lavatory and boarding door. The trade-offs are real — a bulkhead wall in front of you, nothing under a seat to stash a bag in — but on a 30- to 40-minute island hop, they cost you very little.

Row 1: the legroom row

All four seats — 1A, 1B, 1C and 1D — carry the same profile: genuine stretch-out space, a bulkhead ahead, no underseat storage, fixed armrests that won't lift, and a slightly narrower seat because the tray table lives in the armrest. If you're travelling with a shoulder bag you want at your feet the whole flight, this row will annoy you; everything has to go overhead for taxi, take-off and landing. If your legs matter more than your bag, this is the row that delivers. Note that the front of the cabin is sometimes withheld at check-in for weight and balance on lighter loads, so row 1 isn't always released — worth asking at the desk rather than assuming.

Row 2: the door row

Row 2 sits alongside a cabin door, and passengers seated there are typically given a short exit briefing by the crew and a separate safety card. It's a minor formality, and the payoff is a seat with normal recline and normal underseat storage, still ahead of the propellers. 2A and 2D are the ones to ask for if row 1 is closed off.

Rows 3 to 7: the quiet middle-front

This stretch is the most consistent part of the cabin. Standard 30-inch pitch throughout, standard recline, no bulkheads, no lavatory traffic, and still forward of where the propellers bite. Reports from the cabin describe it as unusually hushed for a turboprop, and the light grey interior makes it feel brighter than the size of the tube suggests. Some of these aircraft carry slim, lightweight seats with a thinner shell, which frees up noticeably more knee room than the 30-inch figure implies. Windows and rows line up reasonably well here, but the ATR's small oval windows sit low — if you want the Prony Bay and reef views on the Loyalty Islands runs, an A or D seat in this block is the one to hold.

Rows 8 to 12: the propeller belt

The wing and propeller plane fall roughly through the middle of the cabin. Nothing here is bad — same pitch, same recline as everywhere else — but this is where you'll hear and feel the props most, and where the wing intrudes on the view from the window seats. Choose these rows for convenience, not for quiet.

Rows 13 to 17: aft cabin

Back behind the wing, noise settles down again and the view opens up. The catch is proximity to the rear of the aircraft, where the boarding door, the single lavatory and the galley all sit — expect standing passengers and crew movement near rows 16 and 17. These rows do deplane first, since Air Calédonie uses the rear airstairs, which is a real advantage on quick island turnarounds.

Row 18: the seats to skip

18A and 18B back onto the rear wall and have limited recline, with lavatory and galley activity directly behind. 18C and 18D don't exist on this layout, so the right-hand aisle simply ends at row 17. If you're assigned 18A or 18B, moving even one row forward to 17A or 17B fixes the recline problem entirely.