Apparently Airbus now can easily convert A320ceo orders to the A320neo, as previously Airbus overbooked the remaining A320ceo slots. At the end of July 1503 orders for the A320ceo were in the backlog (3251 for the A320neo).
I expect a few more cancellations and conversions from A320ceo to A320neo:
- Kingfisher 67 A/C
- Alphastream 15 A/C
- Sri Lankan 6 A/C
- Mexicana 4 A/C
- Croatia 4 A/C
- Hamburg Int. 2 A/C
- AirAsia 3 A/C (conversion to neo)
- Wizz 10 A/C (conversion to neo)
- Qingdao Airlines 5 A/C
- Zhejiang Loong 11 A/C
- Spring 30 A/C
- Juneyao Airlines 20 A/C
With the same calculation I did last year (42 aircraft per month and 11.5 months of production per year) I get 638 deliveries until the end of October 2015, when the A320neo should go into airline service, leaving 817 A320ceo in the backlog.
At the end of December 2016 the backlog would be down by another 464 aircraft (I just saw that I made a mistake here last year), leaving 353 A320ceo in the backlog.
Building another 194 A320ceo in 2017 leaves Airbus with 159 A320ceo family aircraft in the backlog in 2018, where production of the A320ceo should end.
The situation is (still) very much different at Boeing - although Boeing always states that the B737NG is sold out.
There are 1755 open orders for the B737NG production line at the end of July 2014. I do not expect any cancellations (but there could be coming more conversions from the NG to the MAX). There are a few announced but not yet finalised NG sales:
- Xiamen 40 A/C
- Air China 20 A/C
- Ruili 14 A/C
- Yakutia 12 A/C
- Oman Air 5 A/C
So while Airbus can now make (some) customers happy by letting them convert A320ceo's to A320neo's, Boeing has to look hard for some more B737NG customers, while Boeing did let customers convert from NG to MAX very much earlier.
UPDATE:
As I wrote this BOC Aviation ordered 30 B737NG (along with 50 B737MAX)...