Aerospace end market check-in: 2025 aircraft deliveries

That matters in a period of elevated copper prices, which continue to affect alloys costs, substitution decisions, and scrap values, as well as the knock-on effects climbing copper contracts have on broader commodity settlements in the terminal markets.

Full-year delivery data from 2025 provides a baseline for how commercial aircraft output closed the year, while recent restructuring around Spirit AeroSystems clarifies how production responsibilities will be delineated going forward.

Airbus: 2025 commercial deliveries

Airbus delivered 793 commercial aircraft in 2025, extending its upward trend from prior years and setting another annual record for backlog.

Commercial aircraft program	2025	2024
A220 family	93	75
A320 family	607	602
A330 family	36	32
A350 family	57	57
Total deliveries	793	766

The A320 single-aisle aircraft family accounted for more than three-quarters of total deliveries. Widebody volumes held steady year over year, with A350 deliveries flat and A330 deliveries slightly higher.

Airbus closed 2025 with a record commercial backlog of 8,754 aircraft, including a year-end widebody backlog of 1,124 aircraft.

From an aluminum perspective, that backlog points to ongoing demand for high-strength plate, extrusion, and forgings tied to wings, fuselage sections, and structural components, even if absolute volumes remain modest relative to other end markets.

Boeing: 2025 commercial deliveries

The Boeing Company delivered 600 commercial aircraft in 2025, a sharp increase from 2024 levels, driven primarily by higher 737 output.

Commercial aircraft program	2025	2024
B737 family	447	265
B767 family	30	18
B777 family	35	14
B787 family	88	51
Total deliveries	600	348

The year-over-year increase reflects a broad rebound across narrowbody and widebody programs.

The 737 aircraft family represented roughly three-quarter of Boeing’s 2025 commercial deliveries, like Airbus year-end figures, while 787 deliveries also increased significantly versus the prior year.

As of the end of 2025, Boeing’s commercial aircraft backlog stood at 6,130 after Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) 606 adjustments, which exclude aircraft orders that have not yet met revenue-recognition thresholds despite being commercially announced. Boeing’s narrowbody 737 family comprised the bulk of unfilled orders and the 1,026 orders in queue for the 787 accounted for a larger share of Boeing’s backlog than widebody aircraft represent within Airbus’ order book.

On the defense side, Boeing deliveries 131 aircraft and systems across defense, space, and security programs in 2025, compared with 112 units in 2024. While relevant for specialty aluminum applications, those volumes remain secondary for most aluminum market participants.

Spirit AeroSystems restructuring

The late-2025 acquisition of Spirit AeroSystems by Boeing and Airbus split the suppliers’ operations along aircraft program lines.

Spirit AreoSystems divested selected Airbus-related assets to Airbus while Boeing acquired Spirit’s remaining operations tied primary to Boeing programs. This split formalized what had already been a program-specific manufacturing footprint.

Airbus took ownership of former Spirit operations tied to its commercial aircraft programs, including the A350 fuselage sections in Kinston, NC, as well as facilities supporting widebody and narrowbody production across France, Morocco, North Ireland, and Scotland.

Airbus received financial compensation as part of the transaction, indicating the acquired operations carried cost burdens or financial exposure that Airbus agreed to absorb in order to stabilize production for its commercial aircraft program.

That dynamic aligns with recent delivery trends: the A350 family, for which fuselage sections are produced at the North Carolina facility, is the only Airbus commercial program whose deliveries declined between 2023 and 2025, while the primary narrowbody correlative—the A320 family—increased deliveries by roughly 6% over the same period.

Boeing’s acquisition consolidated Spirit’s Boeing-focused aerostructure production, including fuselages and major structures for the 737, 767, 777, and 787 programs, along with related aftermarket and defense work.

Boeing framed the move as a way of to bring structural manufacturing back under direct control following years of production disruption.

For context, Spirit AeroSystems traces back to Boeing’s 2005 divestiture of its commercial aerostructures operations, when Boeing sold facilities in Kansas and Oklahoma to what became Spirit AeroSystems. That transaction transferred major fuselage and structural work off Boeing’s balance sheet under long-term supply agreements, a structure that the 2025 acquisition effectively reverses two decades later.

Labor contract expirations at Boeing in 2026

Already shaping up as a year marked by major labor negotiations across manufacturing, 2026 also brings a couple of contract renewal milestones for Boeing.

Two labor contracts covering engineering and technical professionals represented by the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) is set to expire in October.

The agreement governs a large portion of Boeing’s engineering and technical workforce in Washington and Oregon, including employees involved in design, quality, materials engineering, and compliance functions.

While this bargaining unit does not include production workers engaged in final assembly or machining—who are represented separately by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM)—SPEEA-represented employees play a direct role in material review board determinations, engineering sign-offs, and certification-related processes.

According to Boeing’s 2025 financial filings, SPEEA-represented employees account for roughly 10% of the company’s workforce, compared with about 20% represented by the IAM. Of that IAM population, the July 2025 contract expiration applied to the military aircraft facility in Missouri, with a separate IAM agreement covering the larger Washington state workforce.

Another SPEEA contract expiration is slated for Jan. 31, 2026 in Wichita, Ks, concerning a smaller-yet-sizable share of employees.

That agreement covers technical and professional workers that were historically part of Spirit AeroSystems and have since returned to Boeing through the 2025 acquisition.

Although the Wichita unit represents a more limited labor pool than Washington state, it supports aerostructures and engineering functions tied to commercial aircraft programs.

Looking ahead

It should be said, deliveries no longer correlate cleanly with production rates, even though they once served as a decent proxy.

That relationship broke down during the pandemic and never fully reset.

In Boeing’s case the grounding of the 737 MAX severed the link entirely as finished aircraft accumulated in inventory and production slowed, which rendered deliveries a function of customer timing. When deliveries resume, they largely reflected the release of previously built aircraft tied to long-term agreements, not a real-time signal of throughput.

Backlogs complicate the picture further. Both Boeing and Airbus report order books that stretch years into the future and regularly reach staggering numbers.

These figures remained large even during the 2020-2021 aerospace downturn, demonstrating backlog size alone does not confirm near-term production health.

Orders sit across long delivery windows and remain subject to cancellations and deferalls, especially as the companies placing those bookings may change well before their order enters final assembly.

What stands out now is not the size of the backlog but how deliveries and operational control are starting to recalibrate.

Boeing’s 2025 delivery rebound suggests a move back toward its pre-737 MAX trajectory as total commercial deliveries hit their highest level since 2018, the year before the first of two 737 MAX crashes that sparked grounding and regulatory re-approval.

Airbus, meanwhile, has tightened control over its supply chain and continued expanding US-based capacity, including the launch of a second A320 final assembly line at its Mobile, Alabama site in October 2024.

Deliveries alone still require context, but that combination suggests those figures may sit closer to production reality than they did during the disruption-heavy years that followed 2019.