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Biman Bangladesh Airlines is set to sign its first-ever Airbus order this month — four A350-900 widebodies and six A321neo narrowbodies — ending four decades of flying an all-Boeing fleet.
Airbus's A350F freighter flew for the first time on September 29, a 4-hour-11-minute sortie from Toulouse that opens a compressed flight-test campaign toward 2027 deliveries and a direct challenge to Boeing's 777F and 777-8F.
South Korea's SeAH Aerospace & Defense has signed a long-term deal to supply high-strength aluminum alloy for Airbus fuselages and wings, with Airbus locking in the contract before SeAH's material has finished certification.
Vietravel Airlines signed a letter of intent in Paris for 50 Airbus aircraft — 20 A220s and 30 A321-family jets including the A321XLR — as the five-plane Vietnamese carrier plans a rapid leap toward international long-haul-adjacent routes.
Embraer CEO Francisco Gomes Neto says the planemaker is studying a "maybe bigger" future jet without committing to a timeline, while Airbus's Guillaume Faury says entering the 170-to-180-seat market against Airbus, Boeing and COMAC would be "a big risk.
The first Airbus A350F emerged from the Toulouse paint shop on 19 August wearing a fuselage-length parcel livery, with Airbus targeting a maiden flight around 24 September. A 107-aircraft backlog and a hardening ICAO emissions deadline both ride on the certification campaign that follows.
Dozens of companies have tried to build large jetliners. Nearly all of them are gone. The Airbus–Boeing duopoly is not an accident — it is the product of the most punishing economics in manufacturing.
With more than 16,000 jets on order and both manufacturers sitting on roughly a decade of production, 2026 is shaping into a race defined not by selling aircraft but by building them.