Boeing and Airbus this week announced their final tallies for their 2021 industrial output. The combined 951 deliveries were 32% higher than 2020, but still 41% lower than the 2018 peak when the pair handed over 1,606 aircraft.
The first full year of the pandemic, 2021, offered a significant rebound for Boeing and Airbus, testing the resilience of the global airline industry, its two principal aircraft manufacturers and the supply chain that feeds their factories. 
The Air Current dissected the 611 Airbus and 340 Boeing deliveries in 2021 with this new interactive visualization resource available to our subscribers. With each click of the pie, you can drill down further, exploring aircraft families, variants and operators.
There are limitations in the data, sourced from Boeing and Airbus. For example, for deliveries, Boeing lists the aircraft buyer, which in many cases is a lessor, not the final end user of the aircraft. Boeing also doesn’t break out its 737 Max deliveries by variant and those have been added with reporting by TAC.
In the coming days, we’ll be refining our dataset with additional reporting to even more deeply illustrate the customers — both civil and defense — that Boeing and Airbus relied upon on to keep their assembly lines thriving in 2021 as the aviation business continues its slog through the pandemic.
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