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As 2025 opened, the team at Cirium Ascend Consultancy brought together its collective intelligence and insight to estimate how many commercial passenger jets Airbus and Boeing would deliver to customers in 2025 and beyond. Based upon our Cirium Fleet Forecast, plus many years of collective experience, we concluded that Airbus could ship as many as 900 units whilst Boeing might show a strong recovery this year to deliver around 550 passenger aircraft amongst an overall total of 610 commercial jets.

Projecting annual deliveries has become increasingly difficult over the past few years, driven initially by the demand uncertainty induced in the early days of the pandemic but then exacerbated more recently by supply-side uncertainty arising from supply-chain delays and other disruptions at the airframe OEMs. Prime amongst those supply-chain delays have been the engine OEMs. Most specifically, issues within the new-generation CFM Leap and Pratt & Whitney PW1000G programmes have reportedly paced single-aisle deliveries (along of course with Boeing’s own self-induced 737 Max challenges) have caused fewer than expected deliveries from both OEMs.

As a consequence, Airbus delivered 674 single-aisle aircraft last year (599 A320 family and 75 A220s) and Boeing managed only 258. Within our projection of 2025 deliveries, we include an expectation of around 680 A320 family, 100 A220 and 450 737 Max. If these forecasts are to be achieved, and by the way our projections require Airbus to improve 2025 output by around 20% over 2024 and Boeing to increase by 80%, the respective supply chains become pivotal. Both GE and RTX (P&W) have made forward-looking statements in the past 10 days, so we can potentially use those to work out if our projections are credible.

GE noted that it delivered 1,407 Leap engines and expects to increase production by between 15% and 20% in 2025. RTX itself was silent on the number of engines produced but did say it expected to increase large commercial engine output by around 14% whilst at the same time seeing a “modest tilt towards more installs”, indicating airframe OEMs may expect to see slightly more of the 2025 output than they did in 2024. What do these numbers mean?

If GE achieves the mid-point of its planned increase, that would imply around 1,650 engine deliveries in 2025. If we assume that around 20% of these are spare engines, higher than our typical spares assumption but maybe consistent with market demand given Leap is just now starting to see higher volume of first shop visit, then that would yield around 690 shipsets for airframe OEM installation.

At P&W it is a little harder, but we saw around 350 Airbus aircraft deliveries with PW1000G engines in 2024, equating to 700 installed engines. If we assume spares were around 20%, then that implies 770 total engine deliveries last year. Increase by 14% takes us to around 880. Then assume 15% spares this year and we have around 750 engines or 375 installed shipsets.

The overall total of 1,065 engine shipsets is low when compared to the 1,230 deliveries projected above. Of course, Boeing started 2025 with more than 100 737 Max in inventory, including 34 which have already been delivered this year and another 52 737-8/9 variants which almost certainly will be. Those bring the 1,065 total to 1,150, but that is still some 80 aircraft lower than our demand-driven projections. Max volumes could increase further if the 737-7 is certificated this year, with 27 of those in inventory. But that remains highly uncertain for now.

In summary, most recent outlook statements by engine OEMs do suggest that our 2025 delivery projections have downside risk. Last year, we opened with an expectation of more than 1,500 deliveries between Airbus and Boeing, a projection that was iteratively reduced through the year until we arrived at the final much lower totals. It does seem that we may see a similar experience this year, albeit the shortfall looks potentially much smaller given the numbers above.

Finally and with all this in mind, how does January look? I am writing this on the final day of the month and as we stand today (and recognising data lag), initial experience doesn’t look promising. Cirium’s fleet researchers have to date captured details of only two A220, 15 A320 family and 38 737 Max deliveries in January 2025. The first month of the year always features low delivery volumes. Airbus’s January A320 output has ranged between 15 and 32 on an annual basis since 2018, but last year it shipped 26 aircraft so 2025 looks to be lagging that. Boeing typically does a bit better in January and, as already noted, this month’s total to date of 38 does include a vast majority of aircraft which flew for the first time last year or earlier.

Hence, January doesn’t tell us too much other than it is going to be another challenging year both for OEMs and for those of us who love to make short-term forecasts.