Airbus 2025 deliveries: momentum meets reality as the supply chain bites back

Airbus entered 2025 with cautious optimism. After several years of COVID pandemic aftershocks, geopolitical disruption and industrial bottlenecks, the narrative was meant to shift from recovery to consolidation.

Instead, 2025 has become another reminder that for commercial aircraft manufacturing - stability remains elusive.

The decision to lower the annual delivery target - triggered by a supplier quality issue affecting A320 family fuselage panels - is not just a short term operational setback. It is emblematic of a production system still vulnerable to single-point failures and fragile upstream execution.

At first glance, the numbers still look robust. By the end of Nov-2025 Airbus had delivered 656 commercial aircraft, the overwhelming majority were narrowbodies, reinforcing once again that the A320neo family is the economic engine of the programme.

Yet beneath this headline performance lies a more complex story.

More than 600 aircraft were drawn into inspections, with nearly 250 already in final assembly. That scale of disruption inevitably ripples through delivery schedules, customer planning and cash flow, culminating in a sharp slowdown in Nov-2025 handovers and forcing Airbus to lean heavily on an unusually strong Dec-2025 to salvage its revised target.

This report examines who actually took delivery of Airbus aircraft in 2025, and what that distribution says about the state of the global market.

Leasing companies continue to play an outsized - and evolving - role, increasingly acting as conduits to large network airlines, rather than growth-hungry start-ups.

Asia-Pacific and Europe dominate delivery volumes, but with notable subplots: India's continued narrowbody absorption, China's unique appetite for the A319neo, and Africa's striking absence, despite rapid traffic growth.

The geographic and customer mix of deliveries in 2025 highlights both Airbus' enduring strengths and its structural constraints. With a backlog stretching beyond a decade of production, demand is not the problem. The challenge, once again, is execution - and the consequences are being felt well beyond Toulouse.