Widebody Order Gap Update Septermber 2015

Another update of the „bridge situation” for both the A330ceo/neo and the B777/B777X:

There has been some moves regarding the A330. In August Airbus announced some more orders, 22 of them from undisclosed customers. Whether these orders are part of the 45 aircraft order from China is not clear (yet), so there is some uncertainty around it.

On the other side AirAsia X canceled most of their outstanding A330ceo orders, as I suspected back in March this year. But the cancellation is not yet in the orderbook, so we have to keep in mind that the “real” number of open orders is 12 less than in the O&D Excel Sheet. Plus 15 less for Kingfisher of course. Some other risks remain as I mentioned before.

On the other hand the announced purchases of four aircraft from EVA and four by South

B737NG and A320ceo backlog

Scott Hamilton posted a story last week commenting on the backlog situation of the B737NG. He Comes to the conclusion that there is a rather large gap and Boeing would need more than 350 more orders to fill the production until the B737MAX takes over in full.

How large the gap is depends on when exactly EIS of the B737MAX will be and how fast Boeing (and the suppliers) can ramp up production:

Boeing revises ranges of their aircraft

I already wrote back in 2012 that there is something not adding up in Boeing's range esimations for the B737MAX. Now Boeing officially revised the range numbers for all Boeing aircraft.
Boeing says this has to do with revised assumptions for pax, bags and seat weights. We don't know how Boeing revised those numbers, but as I wrote back then something did not add up from the beginning when comparing the range of the B737NG with the B737MAX.

Will the "nuclear deal" lead to higher narrowbody production rates?

Now that obviously the sanctions on Iran will be lifted in the near future after the "nuclear deal" was reached, both Airbus and Boeing will have no problem in finding buyers for their last-of-the-line A320ceo and B737NG. Airbus is overbooked anyway but could afford to allow customers who want to do so to delay deliveries and to switch to the A320neo. Boeing will find Iranian airlines willing to take B737NG's, as there are still delivery slots open in 2017 and 2018 and maybe in 2019.
The real question though is if the pressure to go to even higher rates than already announced (52 for the B737NG/MAX in 2018 and 50 for the A320ceo/neo in 2017) will now lead to quick decisions at both Airbus and Boeing.
But also Bombardier and of course Embraer could benefit from the accord: Bombardier could especially find customers for the CSeries and Embraer could sell more of their E1 line to bridge production to the E2.
Boeing also might sell some B777's to bridge their production gap between the B777-300ER/B777F and the B777-X.

A320neo testing running out of time for EIS 2015?

Yesterday Flightglobal reported that this year Boeing could, for the first time since 2001, deliver more narrowbodies than Airbus. Boeing delivered 243 civil B737 plus 6 for the US Navy until June 30, Airbus delivered 238 A320. Although normally Airbus delivers more aircraft in the second half of the year (H1 2014: 237, H2 2014: 253) and Boeing had also more deliveries in the first half o f 2014 (239), it will be hard for Airbus to beat Boeing this year. This has to do with the transition to the A320neo, where production times should be a little bit longer initially than for the A320ceo.
Also it is questionable if all planned A320neo deliveries in 2015 will be handed over this year. This is highly dependent on when flight testing with the PW1100G will restart and if there are no more hickups in the flight testing.The Flightglobal article suggests that flight tests will start once the now delivered  engines are podded to the nacelles and integrated into the aircraft. This might be at the end of July. The last flight of a PW1100G powered A320neo happened on April 30th, so three months would be lost by then.
Airbus so far insists that deliveries will start towards the end of the year as planned. With the original first delivery targeted for the end of October, there must have been ample margin in the original flight test program or Airbus has to accelerate testing once the aircraft are back in the air.
But also the CFM LEAP-1A powered first A320neo has not been in the air for two weeks now. We don't know yet what is the reason here, if it is engine or aircraft related (although I would be very surprised if it has anything to do with the airframe). So any learning from the CFM powered aircraft that is transferable to the PW powered aircraft is delayed also.
The margin is getting shorter everyday, and Qatar Airways Akbar Al Baker alias U-Turn Al is probably already thinking about how he can make his "fun" out of the situation.