By Karl Sinclair

June 14, 2025, © Leeham News: The Boeing Company (BA) remains upbeat on its annual 20-year commercial aircraft projections, as the aviation industry comes to terms with the economic uncertainty of the current political climate.

Credit: All images – Boeing

Boeing projects a need for 43,600 aircraft over the next 20 years, with 75% of those being single-aisle jets.

This is a drop of 375 aircraft over the previous years outlook, in which the company foresaw a need of 43,975 over the same period. Most of the drop off has happened the wide-body segment, which will now need 7,815 planes, versus 8,065 in 2024, a decrease of ~3%.

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• Airbus 20-year forecast

Industry Growth

“Passenger traffic has tripled in size as the global economy has doubled. Despite the challenges of the last 25 years that we’ve seen both from an exogenous shock standpoint, from a global pandemic standpoint, and even from an economic standpoint through the last 25 years,” explained Darren Hulst, vice-president of Commercial Marketing.

Hulst points to the global aviation fleet growing from 15,000 aircraft in 2000, to over 27,000 aircraft in 2024, as a sign of industry resilience.

Boeing is also cognizant of the increased competition in the sector, as over the same time frame, the top ten airlines in the world accounted for a whopping 45% of industry capacity.

That has dropped to a market share of 30% in 2025.

The growth has been in the Middle East and Asia Pacific regions, coming at the expense of Europe and North American carriers.

Despite multiple worldwide setbacks, Boeing is confident in the continuing trend of growth and fleet expansion.

In the graph above, Boeing details all of the shocks to industry, which has managed to grow at an annualized rate of 5%, since 1990.

Demand by Region

Year-over-year, Boeing expects China to account for a larger percentage of the demand for new aircraft, up 100 basis-points, to 21% of the market.

It also expects that fleet growth will also outpace replacement aircraft, as 22,500 of the projected 43,600 deliveries are used for expansion, while the remaining 21,100 jets will be used to replace aircraft that are currently in fleets.

Given the current climate regarding tariffs and delivery refusals, it will be supremely important for Boeing to have normalized relations with a nation that is expected to accept more then one-fifth of the future commercial aircraft deliveries.

Aircraft shortage

Still recovering from the effects of the global pandemic, the aviation supply chain has been slow to catch-up to demand levels of the OEMs.

“…the industry is only receiving about half or slightly below half the number of aircraft it received in the pre-pandemic years between 2015 and 2018. Overall, I think that results in a shortage, a cumulative shortage of aircraft, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 to 2,000 aircraft.”

At previously exhibited annual production levels of ~800 per manufacturer (Airbus and Boeing), this represents a production loss of about a year, for the industry. Once Embraer and others are added in, the 1,500-2,000 figure is not an unreasonable estimate.

Growth and Replacement

Boeing projects that the lion’s share of growth in the global aircraft fleet, will be in emerging markets.

North America and Eurasia will have the greatest need for fleet replacement, accounting for a combined 54% share of the projected 21,100 future deliveries.

This shrinks to a 29% share of the projected deliveries for future growth.

China, South and Southeast Asia will account for 50% of the growth in the global air fleet, over the next 20 years, according to Boeing.

“I think you can see a kind of two speeds of growth in terms of emerging and advanced economies,” said Hulst. “Emerging economies will be growing about two percentage points per year faster than advanced economies, which means by the end of this forecast, by the mid 2040s, the size of demand within emerging markets and within advanced economies, kind of that short haul and domestic type markets will be about the same size for both the advanced and emerging economies.”

In the 2024 projections, Boeing estimated a need of 20,555 aircraft for fleet replacement and 23,420 for growth.

Eurasia, China, South & Southeast Asia and North America will account for the vast majority of narrow-body deliveries, while the Middle East & Africa and North America & Oceania will receive most of the future wide-body deliveries.

Aircraft usage

In 2005, Boeing released its 20-year Market Outlook, in which it projected a need for 25,700 commercial aircraft.

The company projected a remarkably accurate 4.8 annual growth in passenger traffic, at the time.

What has changed in the industry is the way that aircraft are being used.

“Twenty years ago, the average load factor was about 73%. Today, it’s about 83% or 84%. So, think about that. If 10% or 10 percentage points more of every aircraft is filled, that’s the effect of 10 or 20 more seats on any airplane,” explained Hulst.

He noted the expansion of low-cost carriers, who use high-density layouts, filling as many seats as possible, as one of the drivers of increasing load factors.

“I think the biggest takeaway from my perspective is that single aisle as a percentage of the total fleet has grown already from 55% to 66% of total jet aircraft. And over the next 20 years, we expect that to expand about 70% of aircraft flying in the year 2044…in the single aisle market, in the last 25 years, the average seat size has moved up right around 30 seats from the mid 140s to the high 160s,” he noted.

Boeing detailed the trend in the 2024 outlook.

Airlines are working their fleets harder, increasing the amount of seats on their aircraft and are filling them with more passengers, then they did 20 years ago.

Certification of the 737-10 MAX

Boeing is currently working towards the certification of the 737-10 MAX variant, its largest narrow-body offering, in that regard.

Despite the seemingly endless string of setbacks that the industry has suffered, the commercial aviation sector has remained surprisingly resilient, continuing the cycle of fleet replacement and growth.

With both major OEMs holding onto significant backlogs, the short-term battle will be overcoming the current political uncertainty and rebuilding a supply chain that was heavily damaged during the previous crisis.