Aircraft manufacturers should be riding high thanks to a travel boom that has created unprecedented levels of demand.
Bookings have surged as millions head to the beach and the predicted demise of face-to-face business meetings fails to materialise. Airports including London Heathrow have recently announced record passenger numbers.
Yet Airbus and Boeing are struggling to build planes fast enough to keep up with demand. Both manufacturers are falling short of delivery targets as their supply chains buckle under the strain.
British Airways, Ryanair, Virgin Atlantic and Wizz have all been forced to rein in their planned schedules and watch profits ebb away. The manufacturers themselves have been deprived of vital revenue and reduced to firefighting one production issue after another.
Across much of the aviation industry, what should have been a boom is turning out to be little more than a whimper. Waiting times for the most popular jets are now into the next decade.
The situation can be traced back to multiple causes, including a near-disaster involving a 737 jet that led regulators to cap output at Boeing and engine issues at companies including Rolls-Royce.
But Airbus last week highlighted a more basic factor at the heart of the crunch: the industry is suffering from what amounts to a severe case of long Covid, following the exodus of tens of thousands of experienced personnel during the pandemic.
Three years after the last Covid-related curbs were lifted, manufacturers are still woefully short of veteran engineers and technicians, says Christian Scherer, head of commercial aircraft at Airbus.
“What the supply chain has suffered the most from is a loss of expertise,” he says.
“A lot of people, with years and years of accumulated expertise, that have taken early retirement or have redirected their professional activities elsewhere. That takes a lot of time to rebuild. That’s really the fundamental, deep problem.”
The supply chain crisis last year forced Airbus to revise an 800-plane delivery target to 770 after barely four months. In the event it handed over 766 aircraft, still almost 100 short of the number shipped in 2019.
Scherer insists Airbus will reach those pre-pandemic production volumes “in the foreseeable future,” while adding: “I’m not going to tell you when.”
Boeing, meanwhile, revealed last week that it had delivered just 348 jets in 2024, down 180 on the previous year’s tally and less than half its pre-pandemic peak.
The US giant was plunged into crisis after a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines 737 Max at 16,000 feet last January. Subsequent checks revealed safety and quality-control issues across the supply chain, leading regulators to cap Max output at 38 planes a month.
A Boeing insider later said that the depletion of the workforce during the pandemic meant it had to “turn baristas into engineers” – a reference to the location of the company’s main assembly lines in Seattle, home to Starbucks and a world centre for coffee roasting.
Potential recruits with a technical bent have meanwhile gravitated towards companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, which are also based in the area.
Nick Cunningham, an aviation analyst at Agency Partners, said manufacturers should have seen the staffing problem coming and done more to replace the “big hump of middle-aged workers” who were set to retire around the same time with or without the pandemic.
“It was a collective error on the part of the industry on both sides of the Atlantic. It had become very dependent on a group of grizzled veterans.They all looked like members of ZZ Top and called themselves ‘shop rats’ but they actually did all the work.
“The new generation of recruits is just not as productive. They’re a green workforce and with many of the trainers also retiring it’s going to take years to get them up to speed.
“It becomes much more expensive because you are making fewer things, so volumes drop even though you’re employing the same number of people.”
At Airbus, bottlenecks are affecting the supply of components ranging from aircraft engines, cabin equipment, galleys and seats to toilet doors and even the bolts and washers that hold together sections of fuselage.
Boeing revealed last week that it had delivered just 348 jets in 2024 - Stephen Brashear/Getty Images North America
Shortages of interior items have been exacerbated by airlines seeking to refurbish cabins in ageing planes that are being kept in service precisely because of the lack of new jets.
Guillaume Faury, the chief executive of Airbus, said last week that shortages of even a simple part at a single supplier could be enough to derail a whole aircraft.
He said: “Because we are going at the pace of the slowest of our suppliers, when you think you are there, you are blind-sided by something you were not expecting.
“The number and depth of the crises that we managed last year was very significant. I don’t expect a lot of change in the nature of the problems.”
Attracting new workers is not the only problem manufacturers face. Cunningham says keeping them is also a challenge, even with the lure of relatively attractive pay deals.
He says: “They want a nice desk job where they can be on the internet all day. They don’t want to work in what can be a cold, noisy and occasionally dangerous environment doing something that is repetitive and really not that pleasant.”
Mounting concern about the production crunch was evident in Dublin last week, where aircraft leasing companies that collectively own and manage around half the world’s fleet warned that plane shortages would persist for years.
An over-dependency on ‘grizzled veterans’, or ‘shop rats’, has been blamed for plane-makers’ staffing struggles - Larry W Smith/Getty Images
Steven Udvar-Házy, the executive chairman of Air Lease, told the Airline Economics conference that neither Airbus nor Boeing were meeting “any of their production targets” and had made “big judgment errors” in seeking to increase deliveries before stabilising their operations.
Denis Hogan, a founder of SMBC Aviation Capital, said it would take “until the end of the decade” to fully resolve the supply-chain issues.
Bosses were similarly pessimistic about a parallel crisis surrounding the poor resilience of engines supplied by Pratt & Whitney (P&W) and Rolls-Royce. Issues with engines have forced jets to be recalled for emergency maintenance, further depriving airlines of essential capacity.
József Váradi, the Wizz Air boss, said he had expected groundings of the airline’s A320s for the replacement of worn engines to span no more than two years, but it now appears to be “a four to five-year issue”.
Airbus insists that it is making progress addressing these issues. Dozens of staff are working to alleviate bottlenecks at suppliers such as Spirit, which makes wings for its A220 jet and supplied the faulty door panel to Boeing.
The European company has also formed a task force to address fastener shortages and a team dedicated to helping airlines procure cabin interiors. In some cases, Airbus is providing financing to companies that would otherwise be unable to provide parts at the required pace.
Despite the continued issues, plane-makers plan to boost build rates to reduce order backlogs. Faury said Airbus had no intention of backing away from plans to lift A320 production to 75 planes a month in 2027. That’s 50pc higher than average monthly deliveries last year.
The company is already able to produce aircraft on eight global assembly lines, with two more to be added by next year. Crucially, however, it needs the supply chain to keep in step.
The chief executive said: “It’s not nice to have customers complaining that you’re delivering late. But if we are too shy we waste opportunities to deliver planes. We need to find the sweet spot.”
