LE BOURGET—Boeing President and CEO Kelly Ortberg and Boeing Commercial Aircraft (BCA) CEO Stephanie Pope may have canceled plans to attend the Paris Air Show in light of Thursday’s crash of an Air India 787, but the manufacturer has still released its 20-year Commercial Market Outlook at the outset of the show.
In a statement issued just ahead of the show, Ortberg said he and Pope would not attend Paris “so we can be with our team and focus on our customer and the investigation.” The investigation of Flight AI 171 is ongoing and the aircraft’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders have been recovered from the crash site in Ahmedabad, India.
With May’s order intake of 303 aircraft BCA’s largest in more than a year and the company saying it has reached a production rate of 38 737 MAXs a month, Boeing was on track to present a more optimistic face to the industry relative to the 2024 Farnborough Airshow.
“We continue to make fundamental changes across Boeing to strengthen safety, quality and our culture, and we are seeing steady improvement in our performance,” Ortberg said shortly before the India crash. In an exclusive interview with ATW days before the show, Pope also expressed cautious optimism in BCA’s recovery, saying she was proud of her team’s progress but stressing there was still “a lot of work to do.”
Boeing will not have any airliners in the Paris static or flight displays—and that was also the plan before the AI 171 crash—but is showing a full-size 777X cabin section. Qatar Airways, which placed a large order for Boeing widebodies in May, is planning to bring a 777-300ER to the show.
Meanwhile, Boeing executives are expected to brief media on the company’s latest 20-year Commercial Market Outlook which predicts demand for 43,600 new aircraft over the next two decades.
“Emerging markets, with expanding middle classes, dynamic and competitive airline networks and sustained aviation investment, will play an outsized role in global air traffic growth,” the company said June 15.
“These markets will represent over 50% of the global commercial fleet in 2044, up from nearly 40% in 2024.”
The outlook predicts airliner supply will catch up with market demand around the end of the decade, enabling carriers to increasingly renew and grow their fleets.
“Throughout the first quarter of this century, passenger air traffic tripled and the global airplane fleet more than doubled as the commercial aviation industry navigated significant challenges,” said Brad McMullen, Boeing SVP commercial sales and marketing.
“Resilience will remain a hallmark of this growing industry as we continue to see strong demand for new airplanes with commercial aviation returning to its pre-pandemic growth trajectory.”
The outlook document foresees passenger traffic growing 4.2% annually, as it continues to outpace global economic growth.
The global airliner fleet will nearly double to more than 49,600 airliners as airlines add capacity to meet travel demand, while about 80% of in-service aircraft will be replaced with more than 21,000 deliveries.
Boeing says that narrowbodies will constitute 72% of the global fleet, up from 66% in 2024, driven largely by short-haul travel and LCCs in emerging markets.
The global passenger widebody fleet, meanwhile, will increase to approximately 8,320 airplanes, up from roughly 4,400 in 2024. That growth will increasingly be driven by carriers in emerging markets expanding their long-haul fleets.
On the cargo side, supply chain diversification and expanding express cargo networks will drive a nearly two-thirds expansion of the global freighter fleet and the need for 2,900 production and converted freighters, Boeing predicts.
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