Recently, bitter rivals, Boeing and Airbus, have both announced plans to ramp up production of aircraft. The production ramp up is greatly centered around both manufacturers’ narrowbody families. Both manufacturers have discontinued their jumbo jet types and have since been left with huge spaces open in factories. Airbus had ended superjumbo A380-800 production back in 2021, with Boeing discontinuing their 747-8i (passenger variant) in 2017 and the 747-8f (freighter variant) back in January.
The former A380 production line has remained dormant since the last superjumbo being delivered to United Arab Emirates (UAE) carrier Emirates. This can leave us to assume it has been due to renovations for Airbus to convert it to A320 family production; the line will also be capable of assembling the A321 narrowbody. Another important note is this new line will largely be the Final assembly line (FAL).
For Boeing, there have been plans announced to turn both the Boeing747 and Boeing787 production lines at their Everett superfactory into 737 MAX production lines. This would also eliminate all 737 MAX production in Charleston, South Carolina. The open floor space in Charleston left from the 737 MAX production lines will be replaced with the Boeing 787 Production lines. This will allow Boeing to produce around 42 jets a month by December of 2024. A major blow was dealt to the 737 MAX due to the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system (MCAS) events back in 2019;the events caused a global grounding of all 737 MAX aircraft and halted production. This went farther to cause an investigation that took months and set Boeing back on the order books.
If we look at Boeing’s order backlog for the 737 MAX we will see they have at least 4,300 aircraft on order as stated by The Seattle Times. Airbus has not publicly released the amount of A320 aircraft on order though the company has stated they have an 8,000 aircraft backlog.
Most airlines had large swaths of their fleets go into storage during the Covid-19 pandemic in late 2019 and early 2020. One of the primary issues airlines are currently faced with is not having enough active aircraft to cover demand. Many carriers have returned to returning most of their largest aircraft to service as fast as possible, even if they had intended to retire the type. A prime example of this is the German airline, Lufthansa, returning their A380 fleet to service. Previously, Lufthansa had announced plans to retire all fourteen A380s in their fleet in April 2022; the carrier then quickly reversed the decision announcing their plans to return the type to service in June 2022.
The carrier returned three of the type into service as of this year with plans to return a further four in 2024. Most airlines that have the jet have returned it to service; this is due to its 500 passenger capacity allowing a large amount of passengers on one flight. Airlines have also been strategic with deployment of the aircraft, sending the type on routes like JFK to London. Deploying the aircraft on such heavily traveled routes allows more passengers per flight to be carried; a major issue that comes with airports such as JFK and LHR (London Heathrow) is they are very slot constrained.
Airports operate off of a slot basis; in layman’s terms, meaning an airline pays for the rights to fly into the airport and use certain gates at certain times. These slots cost more at airports like JFK and London due to them being major hubs having a lot higher amounts of traffic leading to competitive gate times and high prices. This is a major aspect that can drive up costs to fly. One of the solutions to this issue is airlines can operate fewer flights with a higher passenger density using larger aircraft, this is one of the reasons airlines have brought back the previously mentioned A380 superjumbo.
This all boils down to one major problem for the airlines, they don’t have the needed fleet sizes in order to cover all the extremely high demand; this is primarily due to not being able to bring stored aircraft back to service fast enough or retired large numbers of aircraft during the pandemic. There is also fuel inefficiency; the airlines want to fly with maximum efficiency and therefore for profit; ordering new, more efficient aircraft helps with this as fuel costs have been on a rise all the while letting them operate more flights with more profit.
Production needs to ramp up in order to keep up with demand and operate with the highest amount of profit airlines need for these new aircraft. Numbers of passengers sky rocketed way faster than airlines expected, and when compared to pre 2019 numbers, there is almost 100 percent return at 32.4 million departures compared to 38.3 million pre 2019. This is a 50 percent increase in demand compared to the around 16 million departures during the pandemic.
If airlines cannot get these new aircraft to keep up with demand then your bank account may feel it when traveling more so than it used to, because of the cost to fly and the smaller availability in capacity compared to demand.
Air travel is important. Whether it be for leisure or business, air travel is a highly valuable asset as it severely slashes travel time over long distances. Boeing and Airbus ramping up production will allow for future travels to keep flying.