Fleet orders & backlog
Who has ordered what from Airbus and Boeing, and what will their fleets look like?
What each airline has on order from Airbus and Boeing, how many it has taken each year, and how old its fleet is. Change the retirement age or the delivery pace to see what the fleet could look like in 2030.
How it works
Order books. Airbus publishes a monthly Orders & Deliveries workbook. Its Worldwide sheet gives, for every customer and every aircraft type, the number ordered, delivered and in operation since the programme began. What's still to come is ordered − delivered. Boeing publishes its Commercial Orders & Deliveries as a Tableau dashboard whose data can be exported: unfilled orders and deliveries by customer, model series, order year and delivery year. Boeing reports the 737 MAX and 777X per customer as one series, so this page does the same; the global view splits them by variant using Boeing's own minor-model table. Boeing's figures are unfilled orders before the ASC 606 accounting adjustment, so they're somewhat higher than the backlog in Boeing's financial statements. The two files spell customers differently ("UNITED AIRLINES" and "United Airlines", legal suffixes, a few different names), so names are normalised and matched before the two are added up.
Lessors and undisclosed customers. About a third of the world's airliners are leased. Lessors such as AerCap, SMBC or Avolon order in their own name and place the aircraft with airlines later, so those aircraft only count for the airline once they're delivered, and only on the Airbus side, where deliveries are listed as "LESSOR (AIRLINE)". Both manufacturers also hold several hundred orders for customers that haven't been named. So an airline's order book here is what it has ordered directly, which can be much less than what it will actually receive. The page says so rather than guessing which lessor aircraft will go where.
Deliveries by year. Boeing's export has every delivery by year, back to the 1950s. Airbus's monthly workbook only lists deliveries by customer for the current year; earlier years come from the December workbook in each of Airbus's annual archives (2021 to 2025 are published), which list every delivery of the year by customer. So the chart starts in 2021, the first year both manufacturers can be shown. An aircraft delivered to a lessor for an airline ("AERCAP (UNITED AIRLINES)") counts for the airline, shown as "via a lessor". Neither manufacturer publishes future delivery dates by customer.
Fleet and age. Air Canada: every aircraft registered to Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge in Transport Canada's Canadian Civil Aircraft Register, with its date of manufacture. Air Canada Express is flown by Jazz under contract and is left out. United: the FAA aircraft registry, taking aircraft registered to United Airlines plus leased ones (registered to bank trustees) that the fleet tracker has seen flying as United, and leaving out United Express. Age is measured from the middle of the year of manufacture. Air France and Etihad have no public register with years of manufacture: their Airbus fleet is Airbus's "in operation" count, their 787s are the aircraft Boeing delivered to them, and other Boeing and Embraer types are the aircraft the fleet tracker has seen flying so far, which is a lower bound. Their average age and retirements are left blank.
2030 projection. For each aircraft family:
fleet 2030 = fleet today + share × order book − aircraft at least R years old by the end of 2030
R is the retirement age you choose (default 25 years, a common planning assumption for narrowbodies). The share of today's order book delivered by the end of 2030 defaults to the industry's current pace: Airbus and Boeing together delivered about 1,400 aircraft last year, and at that rate roughly of the backlog arrives by 2030. The same share is applied to every airline and type. The projection is an illustration built on these assumptions, not any airline's fleet plan.
Limitations. Real delivery slots differ a lot between customers and types (a new customer may wait until the 2030s, a launch customer gets the first slots); airlines publish their own delivery schedules in annual reports, which this page doesn't use. Leased aircraft arriving or leaving, orders converted between variants, cancellations and deferrals aren't modelled, and airlines don't retire aircraft at a fixed age. Types are grouped into families, so "737 MAX" covers the -8, -9 and -10.
Data. Airbus and Boeing figures are for the latest published month. The data is refreshed monthly by a script (scripts/fleet-orders).
For how airlines decide what to order and when, see Network Planning 101, chapter 8: Fleet Planning.
This is a personal project and isn't affiliated with any airline.