In any other year, three airline order announcements in the space of a week covering 457 firm aircraft and purchase rights on another 345 would be stand-out business.
First Turkish Airlines disclosed the long-awaited Airbus portion of a major long-term fleet expansion. It will order another 220 aircraft from Airbus, comprising 150 more A321neos and 70 A350s – including five freighters. Together with options and purchase rights – and 10 A350-900s it ordered in September – the airline could ultimately take 355 Airbus jets as part of the fleet expansion. A separate sizeable Boeing order is also in the works.
That was followed by Lufthansa Group committing to 100 narrowbodies each from Airbus and Boeing. The deal includes 40 firm orders for A220-300s and notably 40 firm 737 Max 8s, the carrier’s first order for the type.
EasyJet too rubber-stamped a firm order for 157 A320neo-family narrowbodies and purchase options on 100 more.
However, in a year in which orders for almost 1,000 aircraft were placed by two carriers from India alone, the industry has become accustomed to large-scale orders.
The driver for the orders is securing a fleet pathway for long-term growth. These latest orders cover aircraft delivering over the latter years of this decade and well into the 2030s.
On the one hand airlines ordering aircraft at such scale is self-perpetuating. Orders push available delivery slots further to the right, increasing pressure on others who maybe thought they had longer to finalise their own fleet plans. It means increasingly slim pickings for those airlines, almost by definition the financially weaker ones, not yet in position to order new fleet of their own.
It also reflects a wider airline shareholder and boardroom mentality that the pandemic is over and it is time to plan for the future. Bulk orders are required to meet the raft of longer-term growth plans that airlines have set out in recent months, be they goals driven around bigger scale or higher profit margins.
As ever, there is a nuance to each aircraft order, and this week’s commitments are no exception.
Lufthansa Group’s order stood out for the 40 firm and 60 purchase rights it took on Max 8s, given that it is the first Boeing narrowbody order from the carrier for 30 years. The group’s wholly owned carriers operate only Airbus narrowbodies and – while partly doubling down on this with commitments for 100 more – Lufthansa is seemingly keen to keep its options open in future.
“The decision for the [737 Max 8] will also give us more flexibility for the procurement of short- and medium-haul aircraft in the future,” says Lufthansa executive board member Detlef Kayser.
EasyJet’s narrowbody order, plans for which were first disclosed in October, is an example of a wider trend toward larger-capacity aircraft. While that is a central plank of EasyJet’s strategy, where it believes it has a competitive need to grow at slot-constrained airports by switching up to A321neos, that has also been evident in recent orders such SunExpress taking 737 Max 10s.
Turkish Airlines’ order meanwhile is a reminder of the growth aspirations of a carrier determined to capitalise on its Istanbul location connecting east and west. The pandemic now appears only a brief interruption to a carrier that has already returned to growth and plans to double its fleet to more than 800 aircraft over the next decade.
