In the wireless asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks, a custom data link control (DLC) layer protocol with stronger error correction ability is needed for mitigating the affect of radio channel errors. This paper applies punctured turbo code schemes to the protection of the header and various payloads in wireless ATM cell, which are realized by the combination of programmable interleaving and puncturing. Their performance is analyzed for Rayleigh fading channel, which shows more significant reduction in cell loss rate (CLR) than the previous systems. Our proposal also provides good balance designs for CLR and the payload bit error rate (BER), and offers potential for future evolutionary improvement of the wireless ATM coding scheme.