Leeham News and Analysis
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Supply chain is improving, but the light at the end of the tunnel could be a train
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By Scott Hamilton
Kevin Michaels, AeroDynamic Advisory. Credit: PNAA.
March 9, 2026, © Leeham News: Every year since the end of the global COVID-19 pandemic, everyone associated in whatever capacity with aerospace has complained about the supply chain.
There is a workforce shortage.
Suppliers are unable to meet contractual deadlines.
Airbus and Boeing haven’t been able to deliver their airplanes on time. Sometimes the aircraft are months later.
Engine makers are to blame.
Interior suppliers are to blame.
The little supplier making the widget is to blame.
Delays still plague the industry, but at long, long last, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel.
“I don’t want to focus just on the negatives. The bottom line is that the supply chain is improving. You talk to most executives at OEMs, they’ll tell you that supply chain is in better shape today than it was a year ago or two years ago,” said Kevin Michaels, managing director of the supply-chain consulting firm Aerodynamic Advisory.
Nevertheless, there’s a very real possibility that the light is from another set of oncoming trains.
“We’ve had some very interesting dynamics this year,” Michaels said during an appearance last month at the annual Pacific Northwest Aerospace Alliance (PNAA) conference.
What’s on those trains?
Regulatory bottlenecks and rare earth production concentration and shortages are just two of the overarching areas continuing to face the aerospace industry. Engines and interiors remain challenging.
Open Forum, Week of March 9
LNA’s Comments Open Forum allows Readers opportunities to comment about any post (note, we said “Post”, not any “Topic”). All comments will be held for review and Moderation per our new policy. The Open Forum enables Readers to Comment on paywall articles (to the extent the paywall preview is open to all readers).
Maintain civility and follow Reader Comment rules.
A new Open Forum will be posted weekly.
Embraer forecasts delivery growth as backlog jumps 20%
By Thomas Blackwood
Mar 6, 2026, © Leeham News: Embraer expects to increase deliveries from both its commercial and executive aviation units this year after posting record revenue in the full fiscal year 2025 as the backlog grew by a fifth.
In its results published on Friday, the Brazilian plane-maker recorded revenues of $7.58 billion in 2025, the highest annual level ever, an 18% year over year increase and above the high end of Embraer’s guidance.
The Defense & Security and Executive Aviation divisions performed particularly well, with revenues up 36% and 25% yoy respectively – although the results were weaker for the company’s Commercial Aviation unit, despite a strong showing for its E2.
Embraer’s adjusted EBIT stood at $656.8 million for 2025, including a $54 million hit from U.S. import tariffs. That compared with $708.2 million adjusted EBIT in Embraer’s 2024 results, or $558.2 million excluding the payout from the Boeing arbitration.
“This performance was achieved despite the impact of U.S. import tariffs, and reflects our discipline in our ongoing cost reduction initiatives and efficiency gains,” Chief Financial Officer Antonio Carlos Garcia said in a call with analysts on Friday morning.
Guidance for 2026 shows a target for Commercial Aviation deliveries of between 80 and 85 aircraft and Executive Aviation deliveries between 160 and 170 aircraft. The upper end of the guidance, 255 deliveries, would result in a 4.5% increase in deliveries yoy.
Bjorn’s Corner: Faster aircraft development. Part 30. Wrap-up.
By Bjorn Fehrm and Henry Tam
March 6, 2026, ©. Leeham News: We started the series on developing a new airliner in the 14 CFR Part 25 class (i.e., not a commuter-class aircraft) on August 1st 2025. The objective was to write a series about such development with people I knew that has “been there, done that”?
Here is how the series started:
Four years ago, I did a series on aircraft development with Henry Tam and Andrew Telesca, both part of the canceled Mitsubishi SpaceJet program. The series was about the arduous task of developing and producing a certified aircraft for the FAA Part 23 standard and its EASA equivalent. The idea was to better describe what’s ahead for the many upstarts that wanted to develop green aircraft and VTOLs. Now we will do a series about recent ideas on how the long development times for large airliners can be shortened. New projects talks about cutting the development time by one-third. Is this realistic?
“Resilience is key” to Airbus production ramp-up
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By David Slotnick
March 5, 2026, © Leeham News: Airbus’ head of procurement shared a rallying cry for both OEMs and suppliers at the Pacific Northwest Aerospace Alliance (PNAA) in suburban Seattle on Feb. 10, ahead of the European planemaker’s plans to increase production to record-breaking rates.
Florian Seidel. Source: Florian Seidel.
In a speech at the annual conference, Florian Seidel, the chief of strategic procurement at Airbus Americas, urged the entire supply chain from top to bottom to focus on working “like Swiss clockwork” as manufacturing increases and airline customers continue to require support throughout each aircraft’s operating life.
The call for continued close collaboration and efficiency comes as Airbus sets its sights on production rates that exceed even peak pre-pandemic levels. While Airbus plans to increase rates on all of its commercial programs, Seidel described the target on the A320-family — 75 per month in 2027 — as “the most impressive” ramp-up, requiring a “huge effort across the entire supply base.” (Update: A week later, during the Airbus earnings call for 2025, this target has shifted to 2028.)
Additionally, Airbus plans to grow the A220 to 12 per month this year, the widebody A330 to 5 per month by 2029, and the flagship A350 to 12 per month in 2028.
“Resilience is key” to making that ramp-up successful and sustaining those rates, Seidel said.
“This is a ramp-up that’s unprecedented, and that we require the resolve of the entire supply base to make it happen,” he added.
The state of alternative propulsion aircraft? Part 6.
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By Bjorn Fehrm
March 5, 2026, © Leeham News: Before Christmas, we started a series examining the status of alternative propulsion projects. We finished on December 18 by looking at Series Hybrids, often as battery-electric aircraft with range extenders (Figure 1).
The range extender is the natural next step when a project realizes that a pure battery-electric aircraft won’t be able to fly the missions the market is asking for.
Figure 1. The Heart Aerospace Battery-Rlectric ES-30 with dual range extending turbo-generators in the back. Source: Heart Aerospace.
After a while, analysing the range extender, the drawbacks become increasingly obvious. Charging the battery system in flight or directly feeding the electric propulsion system from a turbogenerator is inefficient. The losses along the path from the gas turbine through a generator, an inverter, and then to a motor that drives a propeller or fan are much higher than when the gas turbine drives the propeller directly.
A series hybrid can’t compete on operational economics with the aircraft it shall replace (for example, the Cessna Caravan or the SAAB 340). Projects then turn to parallel hybrids, the subject of today’s article.
Aviation Traffic Paralyzed by Iran Conflict
Managing Editor, AIN
March 2, 2026, © AIN: Business aircraft operations across the Gulf region remained paralyzed on Monday as airspace and airports remained closed due to the ongoing military conflict between Iran and U.S. and Israeli forces. While the impact on airline services remains far greater, the business aviation sector appeared to have few options to exercise its usual flexibility to evacuate aircraft, crew, and passengers.
The full story may be found here.
Airbus: Repeatedly Missing the Mark on delivery guidance
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By Karl Sinclair
March 2, 2026, © Leeham News: With the closing of the 2025 financial year, Airbus SE (AB) estimated how many commercial aircraft it expects to deliver to customers in the coming 12 months.
Along with guidance on expected revenues, profits, and free cash flow (FCF), investors and analysts use delivery metrics to assess not only Airbus’s success but also how the heavily integrated supply chain beneath the OEM is functioning.
It only takes one missing part to keep an aircraft glued to the tarmac, and as the old adage goes, “When a supplier has a problem, Airbus has a problem.” Even when it is buyer-furnished-equipment (BFE), like interiors.
Airbus has missed its aircraft delivery guidance in each of the last three years. The company had to reduce its guidance as the lack of engines, BFE, other parts, and quality control issues combined to cause Airbus to miss its early guidance.
Related Article
How close do the estimates provided by Airbus, some 12 months out, come to reality at year-end?
Are the projections pie-in-the-sky numbers or can they be safely relied upon to provide a clear picture of the short-term future?
LNA takes a deep dive into Airbus guidance accuracy by analyzing the original projections for the previous three years, any changes that it has made to those targets, and how well those prognostications held up at year-end.
Open Forum, Week of March 2
LNA’s Comments Open Forum allows Readers opportunities to comment about any post (note, we said “Post”, not any “Topic”). All comments will be held for review and Moderation per our new policy. The Open Forum enables Readers to Comment on paywall articles (to the extent the paywall preview is open to all readers).
Maintain civility and follow Reader Comment rules.
A new Open Forum will be posted weekly.
Bjorn’s Corner: Faster aircraft development. Part 29. AI and the Program Plan.
By Bjorn Fehrm and Henry Tam.
February 27, 2026, ©. Leeham News: Last week, we looked at the development timeline for Part 25 airliner programs to reach Entry Into Service (EIS) after launch, Figure 1.
We can see that development times have doubled from the 1960s to the 1980s, compared with development since the year 2000.
The main change is the complexity of the aircraft, both in terms of highly optimized structures using new materials and avionics/flight control systems with many software code lines that require extensive verification.
We concluded that modern toolchains, with the capability to produce so-called Digital Twins, helped avoid further slip in development times, but they could not reduce them. The question then remains, can the employment of AI change this?
Figure 1. The development times for airliners over the years. Source: Leeham Co.