American aerospace giant and the country's biggest exporter. Boeing operates as a duopolist alongside Airbus, though it trails its European rival in both production and orders.
Boeing's reputation suffered after two fatal crashes of 737 MAX short-haul aircraft in late 2018 and early 2019, which led to a 20-month grounding. It has continued to struggle with quality control; in early 2024 a fuselage panel on another 737 MAX blew off mid-air. The Federal Aviation Administration oversees production lines directly to ensure safety and quality. On May 23rd 2025 Boeing reached a deal with America's Department of Justice to avoid prosecution for the crashes, sparing it from being branded a corporate felon—which might have made it ineligible for future defence contracts.
As of mid-2025, Boeing is not yet producing 737 Maxs at the FAA's capped rate of 38 a month, but expects to do so soon, with plans to increase gradually to 57 a month by end of 2027—a target it once hoped to hit in 2020. Production of the long-haul 787 Dreamliner, also previously hampered by quality problems, is rising.
On May 14th 2025 Boeing won its biggest-ever order for widebodied planes: 160 aircraft for Qatar Airways, following a visit by Donald Trump. A trade deal between America and Britain brought with it an order from British Airways's parent company. During South Korea's president Lee Jae-myung's visit to Washington in August 2025, Korean Air pledged to buy 103 new jets from Boeing, its largest-ever order.
Boeing's defence-and-space division suffered annual losses from 2022 as it struggled to fulfil fixed-price contracts. The first quarter of 2025 was the first in three years that the business did not attribute a loss to one of its programmes. In March 2025 Boeing beat Lockheed Martin for a contract worth over $20bn to develop the F-47, a new fighter jet for the US Air Force.
Boeing and Airbus's combined deliveries of under 1,400 new planes in 2025 were some way off the record of just over 1,600 in 2018. The resulting shortfall in the supply of aircraft is unlikely to be resolved before 2031 at the earliest, according to IATA. Airbus has had supplier troubles of its own; in early December 2025 it cut its delivery target for the year from 820 to 790, owing to a production flaw at a supplier of fuselage panels. Problems with some Pratt & Whitney engines have led to the grounding of a third of the global fleet of Airbus's A320neo single-aisle jets.
China's retaliatory ban on deliveries of Boeing planes was lifted after a 90-day truce in the trade war. The cost of tariffs on imported parts is estimated at $300m–500m for 2025, some of which Boeing may pass on to airlines.
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