Boeing’s Market Forecast Echoes Gulf War

Boeing’s latest 20-year delivery forecast for 43.625 aircraft is almost identical to last year’s Commercial Market Outlook (CMO). It’s just 25 aircraft more compared to the 2025 edition. This tiny difference is explained by what Darren Hulst, Vice President of Commercial Marketing, refers to as “an echo” from the current Middle East war and related economic effects.

In the Global Market Forecast (GMF) that Airbus

released on July 8, the European airframer quantified the Gulf war effect to slow down air traffic/RPKs to 2.1 percent this year. On average, traffic would continue to grow by 3.9 percent per year through 2045. Boeing guides a linear baseline scenario of 4.0 percent growth per year. But it also includes a less optimistic scenario of 3.6 percent and a more optimistic one of 4.1 percent.

Boeing’s CMO forecast of 43.625 aircraft (43.600 last year) is not fully comparable to Airbus’s GMF of 42.060 new deliveries, as Boeing includes freighters and Airbus doesn’t. The Europeans will share their cargo update in October. Including aircraft that will remain in service, the world fleet will grow to over  50.000 aircraft in 2045.