Good days for the A320!

What a week for Airbus! John Leahy predicted at the beginning of last week during his presentation at the ISTAT conference that until the end of March Airbus will have more than 2000 orders for the A320neo. While the number itself is technically just as good as 1900 or 2100, it justifies once more the decision to go ahead with the neo program in December 2010. Boeing, as it seems, was really caught by surprise, despite Airbus was talking about the possible launch for months before deciding to launch the neo program.

Lufthansa

The Lufthansa order was not a big surprise. I wrote about that in an earlier post. Nico Buchholz, VP

Fleet Planning, said last year that the fleet in the whole Lufthansa family should be comprising less aircraft families and with the initial order for 30 A320neo in 2011 it was clear that the A320neo will be the future narrowbody aircraft, at least for the 150+ seat market. The CSeries has a good chance to get more orders, too. Swiss will get 30 CS100 starting in 2014 and there are 30 options, which can also be converted to the larger CS300.

There was a remote chance for the B737MAX, however, as this would have given Lufthansa Technik  a better chance to get a slice from the MRO market for the aircraft itself and the LEAP-1B engine. So I would not rule out that there will be a B737MAX order in the future, but it seems even more unlikely now.

Turkish Airlines

This order was expected to be signed during Angela Merkels visit to Turkey in February, but was held up due to industrial reasons. We don’t know if now more Turkish suppliers will  be involved in the A320 program.

With the order heavily focusing on the A321ceo/neo I see a future order for the B737MAX-8, as it would be unusual to have the smallest narrowbody in the fleet with around 180 seats. The four A320neo maybe will serve for government needs? Who knows, but four aircraft barely makes a sub-fleet…

I could also imagine an order for the CS300 to round up the narrowbody fleet in the lower seat count segment.

Lion Air

Well, this order floated around in the blogosphere and rumor mills for how long now? Finally it’s there. And as with the Boeing order politics play their part, of course. Many people will question is Lion needs so many aircraft, but let’s do the math: at the end of February Lion had 123 open orders for the B737NG. Malindo, the new malaysian subsidiary, will alone get another 26 aircraft until the end of 2014. Batik Air, another start-up this year, also will get some aircraft from Lion’s orderbook. Lion itself got 24 aircraft last year. So if Lion wants to grow steadily in the next years and also wants Malindo to effectively play against AirAsia in their home market, they need more aircraft. And this is exactly what this order is about.
 

All in all, Airbus now has 301 new firm orders for the A320neo family and 115 new orders for the A320ceo family in one week. Together with orders from AA and ALC Airbus booked 475 orders for the A320neo already this year – with the Paris Air Show still to come…

Next to order a bunch of aircraft is Ryanair - rumors are ranging  from 170 to 200 B737NG! Not a bad year for narrowbodies!