Airbus has lowered its full-year target for commercial aircraft deliveries, from 820 to 790. The European airframer attributes the revision to a "recent supplier quality issue on fuselage panels impacting its A320-family delivery flow". Observers had been questioning the feasibility of the previous target for some time as Airbus's monthly deliveries this year showed no year-on-year growth until September. By the end of October, Airbus's year-to-date deliveries had reached 585, up from 559 in 2024. That meant 235 deliveries would be required across November and December to meet the 820 target. In 2024, the manufacturer delivered 207 aircraft in November-December, bringing that year's total to 766. Earlier this year, Airbus said supply shortages for CFM International Leaps had created a fleet of engine-less but otherwise completed "gliders". But Airbus and CFM were confident that production would catch up and that the fleet inventory would be delivered in the second half of this year. Airbus had reiterated the 820 target during a third-quarter results briefing on 29 October. Despite the cut to the target, Airbus is still guiding towards full-year adjusted EBIT of €7 billion ($8.15 billion) and free cash flow before customer financing of €4.5 billion.

A new report shows global air‑travel demand continues to hold up in late 2025, with October’s traffic rising 6.6 % year‑on‑year compared with 2024, supported by robust international demand and rising load factors — a trend prompting airlines to increase capacity heading into the holiday season. 

Airbus chief Guillaume Faury has highlighted the huge international effort in recent days to check thousands of A320-family aircraft around the world for potential flight-control software malfunction. "We have been very busy over the weekend with our airline customers [and] regulators," Faury said at a conference held by the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD) on 2 December. "I want to commend the EASA leadership in this situation. We have to stay very humble, because it was a safety concern. We had to deal with it." On 28 November, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) issued an emergency airworthiness directive (AD) mandating operators of A319s, A320s and A321s to immediately roll back a software update for the aircraft's elevator aileron computer and revert to a previous configuration, because the update was found to be susceptible to potential malfunction in locations with intense solar radiation. Faury cites an incident with a JetBlue A320, in which that aircraft pitched down at altitude, as the prompt for EASA's directive. The European AD was followed by similar action by the US Federal Aviation Administration. Airbus estimates that 6,000 A320-family aircraft were affected by the ADs. "The decision [to intervene] and the way that was executed was probably better than expected, thanks to the mobilisation of a lot of people around the world in a few days," Faury acknowledges. The event was a reminder that "planes flying in the air are something we have to be very mindful of, and that safety is a day-to-day, minute-by-minute concern," he says. "There's probably a lot of learnings that we need to take from this event. Safety has been managed, that was the top priority. I just like to stay very humble with that situation. We don't want to face those situations again."