Airbus secured the biggest aircraft order in aviation history, notching a 500-plane deal with India’s dominant airline, IndiGo on the first day of the Paris Air Show. The mammoth accord for Airbus’s top-selling A320 family of single-aisle jets brings IndiGo’s order backlog to close to 1,000 planes and extends its lead in the world’s fastest-growing large market for aviation.
“No one has ever ordered an order of this magnitude,” IndiGo chief executive Pieter Elbers said from the podium. “It speaks to the potential of Indian aviation and the ambitions which Indigo is having.”
Aviation executives arrived in Paris on Monday for the first air show in the city in four years. The industry’s biggest conclave is expected to yield a bounty of jetliner orders for Boeing and Airbus.
The industry is struggling to manage a surge of growth after travellers stormed back to the skies in force after the Covid-19 pandemic. Chief among the challenges are persistent supply chain kinks that have slowed output. That’s left some airline executives wondering when they’ll finally get the jets they’re ordering at the show, while Airbus and Boeing are pushing to raise production as fast they can to help alleviate the bottleneck.
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Qatar Airways chief executive Akbar al-Baker said there was a risk that airlines were ordering too many aircraft, “at least in our region”. Emirates has said it wants to buy more aircraft, and Turkish Airways is also in the market for additional jets. Riyadh Air has announced orders as it builds a new airline in Saudi Arabia.
“We have players flooding the market with huge numbers of planes, I just hope that they’re doing this right,” Mr Baker said. The executive said he would place orders again in the “not too distant future” once the carrier’s fleet replacement plans run out.
Saudi start-up Riyadh Air – which recently hired experienced Irish aviation executives Ray Gammell and Peter Bellew – is shopping for narrow-body aircraft and is “actively engaged” in talks, with the two major plane makers vying for the sale, its chief executive Tony Douglas said. The airline has brought over an airliner to Paris to show off its new livery, an unusual hue of dark lavender that the carrier says will set it apart at airports.
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Boeing plans to reach a monthly build rate of 42 aircraft on its bestselling 737 Max model before the end of the year, Stan Deal, the manufacturer’s head of commercial operations, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV at the air show. The company is also laying the groundwork for a step-up to a monthly pace of 48 jets over time, he said.
On the bigger 787 Dreamliner, Mr Deal said the aircraft was the “next natural act” to be offered as a freighter model. – Bloomberg
