Farnborough orders top $100 billion

Lessors and carriers from around the world placed over 900 commercial aircraft orders and commitments at last week’s Farnborough Air Show, with a value (at list prices) of well over US$100 billion . This is well up from the 2012 edition of the Farnborough Show, and comes despite fears by some in the industry that backlogs at Airbus and Boeing were already too large.

The chart below shows our summary of the orders and commitments we are aware of. It is possible that some of the commitments (in the form of Memoranda of Understanding and Letters of Intent) will evaporate before they are firmed up, but most will be turned into firm orders and the total of 919 will not likely shrink too much.

Breaking the orders down in a variety of ways, we note the following:

• Of the 919 total orders and commitments, only 6 were for freighters — less than 1%. Of the six, four were for 777Fs (Qatar Airways), and two were for 737-700Cs (Air Algerie).

• Lessors placed 507 orders, or 55% of the total, with the Airbus A320neo (257 orders) and ceo (46 orders) accounting for 68% of the lessor total. The next most popular type for the lessors was the just-launched A330neo, which garnered 55 orders.  The remaining 109 lessor orders were distributed in small numbers over a variety of types.

• Carriers placed 412 orders, or 45% of the total. The most popular types were the Boeing 737MAX (86 orders), the Embraer E2 regional jet family (80 orders), and the Airbus A330neo (66 orders)

• Looking specifically at Airbus and Boeing, one interesting observation is that while the bulk of the Airbus orders (80%) came from lessors, with just 20% from carriers, for Boeing it was almost the reverse, with 74% of the orders from carriers and 26% from lessors.

• And finally, missing from the Farnborough order frenzy were the two biggest aircraft types currently available: the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 747-8.