Boeing under scrutiny again after Air India crash: How does it fare against Airbus?

The Air India Boeing 787 crash last week has stripped the bluster from this year’s show, which runs through this week. Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg cancelled his visit, and GE Aerospace, whose engines were fitted on the fatal 787 Dreamliner, called off an investor briefing. Although the reason for the Air India plane crash is unknown, it presents a poor image for Boeing. This incident is the latest in a series of setbacks that have defined much of the past decade for the under-fire American company.

Till 2018, Boeing was riding the growth in civil aviation and shaping advances in fuel efficiency and distance travelled, epitomised by the launch of its 737 Max in 2016. However, two accidents in 2018 and 2019 led to the 737 Max fleet being grounded globally from March 2019 to November 2020. Meanwhile, Airbus, its European rival, kept chipping away under the radar, creating a contrast in shareholder returns.

Airbus barely made any news; Boeing became the news. The grounding of 737 Max had a cascading effect on Boeing’s operations. Even as the pandemic stalled business, Boeing plodded through inquiries around safety with regulators and legislators, large layoffs, worker strikes and leadership change. Deliveries suffered. Between 2019 and 2024, it delivered about half the planes compared to Airbus. In the last four financial years, while Airbus has earned a net profit, Boeing has reported losses.

Also Read: How the crash impacts Air India, insurers and Boeing

Perceptions of safety

Accidents are one issue for Boeing, even though, statistically, air travel remains a low-risk mode of transport. According to IATA, a global aviation grouping, there were 146.4 million flights in the five years from 2019 to 2023. This period saw 1,177 accidents, as per the Aviation Safety Network, or a ratio of 0.0008%. Further, about 17% of these accident-hit flights registered a fatality. Put another way, on average, an accident happened once in about 124,000 flights and a death once in about 743,000 flights.

Currently, both Airbus and Boeing roughly have an equal number of aircraft in operation—14,294 for Airbus as of 31 May and “more than 14,000" for Boeing. Yet, between 2015 and 2025, Boeing planes have registered more accidents than Airbus (467 versus 246), and deaths (1,458 versus 564). However, both are equal in the incidence of deaths in accident-hit flights (about 6%), and have a better record in crashes than the broader industry, including private planes (17%).

Waiting period

The Boeing accidents have taken a toll on the company’s operations, as they pointed to structural flaws in the make of its 737 Max. Thus, in 2024, Boeing closed with revenues of about $66.5 billion, which was an increase of 7% over its 2021 revenues. Airbus, by comparison, went from revenues of about 52 billion euros in 2021 to 69 billion euros in 2024, an increase of about 33%.

The problem for Boeing is deliveries, not orders, where it ran ahead of Airbus in the first half of the past decade and then mostly matched it in the second half. The commercial aircraft industry is a duopoly, and is capital- and tech-intensive in nature. The airline business is such that orders are placed in bulk, but mostly delivered one plane at a time. Thus, both manufacturers run a waiting period in their deliveries and have healthy order books.

Also Read: DGCA orders Air India to conduct immediate checks of all Boeing 787-8/9 aircraft

Capacity constraints

Among the Indian airlines, Air India and Akasa Air are currently both facing the prospect where their aircraft supplier (Boeing) is unable to keep up with their appetite to fly. To some extent, that is also the case with IndiGo, which has ridden almost wholly on Airbus to become India’s largest airline; the 9 Boeing aircraft currently in its fleet are all on lease. In India, thanks to IndiGo, Airbus outnumbers Boeing by roughly a factor of three.

The industry’s duopolistic nature also means a manufacturer-specific issue can have an outsized effect on operations. Boeing was picking up speed in 2025, matching Airbus in deliveries (220 versus 243). But it’s again running into headwinds. First, there were the new Trump tariffs on exports, which hiked the cost of planes for Chinese airlines, and deferred deliveries. Now, it’s the Air India crash.

www.howindialives.com is a database and search engine for public data