Boeing’s Return to 600 Deliveries, and What a Baird Analyst’s 2016 Forecast Looks Like Now

Boeing delivered 600 commercial aircraft in 2025, its highest annual total since 2018. In Q1 2026 it delivered 143 jets to Airbus’s 114, the first quarter in which Boeing decisively beat its duopoly partner since the 737 MAX grounding cycle and the 787 production halts. On a recent episode of The Real Eisman Playbook, Baird’s Peter Arment walked through the recovery against the lens of his own 2016 pitch, when he forecast roughly $40 per share in free cash flow for the early 2020s. Reality intervened, the cash-flow story “went out the window” for several years, and now, by his read, it is coming back. This article anchors his framing to the production numbers and the parts of the thesis that remain unfinished.

Key facts at a glance

• FY 2025 commercial deliveries: 600 aircraft, Boeing’s highest annual total since 2018, per Manufacturing Dive’s reporting on the year-end deliveries.
• Q1 2026 deliveries: 143 commercial aircraft, beating Airbus’s 114, the strongest Q1 since 2019, per AIAA’s coverage of the Q1 numbers.
• Q1 2026 revenue: $22.2B, up 14% year over year. Operating margin: -6.1%, narrower than prior quarters, per AeroTime’s Q1 2026 financial coverage.
• Arment cited a multi-year cadence forecast on the podcast: “sustained high levels of production 28-29 somewhere in there,” meaning the production plateau he expects in 2028-2029.
• Same episode, his framing: “We’re not in an investing cycle. There’s no new airplane coming. We actually like Boeing. We think it’s a good stock.”

The duopoly engine: a 15-year doubling

Arment’s first argument is the structural one, and it doesn’t depend on any quarter’s delivery number. Global air traffic compounds at roughly 5% per year. By the rule of 72, that means the global installed base of commercial aircraft doubles roughly every 15 years. Over the past 40 years, only four calendar years saw negative air-traffic growth: 1991 (driven entirely by North America, which was then 45% of global traffic versus 19% today), 2001 after 9/11, the Global Financial Crisis, and COVID. Every other year, the base grew.

That growth has to be served, and the only two entities that can serve it at scale are Boeing and Airbus. The duopoly’s economics resemble owning Moody’s and S&P together, in Arment’s framing: a captive market with regulatory and capital barriers that make new entry effectively impossible at scale. The thesis is not “Boeing will execute well in Q3 2026.” The thesis is that the demand backdrop is one of the most reliable compounding stories in the industrial economy.

The capital cycle: “spend billions to lose billions to make billions”

The harder part of the thesis is the capital cycle. Boeing and Airbus run on multi-decade clean-sheet aircraft programs. As Arment puts it on the podcast, the saying inside the industry is “we have to spend billions to lose billions to make billions.” That is, billions to develop a new platform, billions of losses during the production ramp, and only then billions in eventual program profit.

The 787 is the cautionary case. Boeing budgeted roughly $15B to bring the 787 to market in 2011. They spent roughly $30B. The plane itself is excellent; airlines and passengers love it; it generates positive cash margins today. But across the totality of the investment, Boeing earns only a low single-digit margin on the program. A great product is not the same as a great investment.

The rule that follows: do not own Boeing during the early part of a clean-sheet R&D cycle. Own Boeing when production is ramping and cash is coming in.

Why there is no new airplane

Boeing’s current strategic position is that it has chosen not to start a clean-sheet program. The arithmetic is straightforward. A new airframe is roughly five years of development plus one year of flight testing, then another three years of production ramp before the platform delivers material volume. That is an eight-year window in which Airbus can take share without Boeing being able to respond with a new product. When Boeing was last at this decision point, in roughly 2012-2014, the bean counters made the call: re-engine the 737 instead of starting fresh. That became the MAX.

The decision had a logic. It was also the source of the next chapter.

The MAX chapter, and why the cash story disappeared

Stretching an existing airframe pushes engineers to the limits of what an old design can do. The 737 MAX program produced a great-looking platform on paper and a flaw in the maneuvering software that surfaced in the form of two crashes. The certification halt that followed cost Boeing years and billions of cash flow. Compounding it: the COVID demand shock arrived during the grounding, and a sequence of quality-control investigations followed once production resumed.

Arment’s summary of the period was direct: “All of a sudden the cash-flow story went out the window. Cash flow and earnings across the board. The street was like, wow, this is kind of uninvestable. For a couple of years.”

In 2016, before any of this, his own pitch was that Boeing would earn roughly $40 per share in free cash flow by the early 2020s. That number, anchored against the eventual outcome, is the simplest measure of how much the MAX cycle cost.

What the production numbers actually show

The recovery is now visible at four levels: full-year deliveries, the head-to-head with Airbus, the revenue line, and the backlog.

Metric	2025	Q1 2026	Per source
Commercial deliveries	600	143	Manufacturing Dive, AIAA
Airbus deliveries (Q1 peer comparison)	,	114	AIAA
Year-over-year revenue change	,	+14%	AeroTime
Operating margin	,	-6.1% (narrowing)	AeroTime

Boeing has not delivered 600 commercial aircraft in a single year since 2018. The Q1 2026 beat over Airbus is not a tied quarter or a narrow miss; it is 143 to 114, the largest single-quarter Boeing-over-Airbus gap since the MAX grounding.

Arment’s 2028-2029 plateau

The single most specific forward-looking detail in Arment’s framing is the production-plateau forecast. He expects “sustained high levels of production 28-29 somewhere in there,” meaning 2028-2029. The shape is not “deliveries grow forever from here.” It is recovery into 2027, peak production cadence in 2028-2029, and then a multi-year plateau “unless there’s some sort of like macro event risk that takes demand off the table.” During the plateau, both Boeing and Airbus are delivering at full rate against the backlog.

Cash math anchored to deliveries follows that shape, because the cost of producing each airplane is largely sunk before the customer pays. The cash event is the delivery. More deliveries at stable per-unit margin produces step changes in free cash flow, not marginal improvements.

How this maps to the 2026 number

In 2026, two threads are running in parallel:

• Operating margin is still negative. Q1 2026 came in at -6.1%. That is narrower than prior quarters but it is still a loss. The cash margin required to fully retire the post-pandemic debt overhang is higher than what’s being generated now.
• The supply chain has stopped being the binding constraint. Earlier quarters showed delivery-rate ceilings driven by supplier capacity. The 143 Q1 2026 number says the supplier-side bottlenecks have eased enough that Boeing can continue ramping the 737 toward its medium-term target of 38 per month.

Arment’s framing fits both. The recovery is real, the recovery is also unfinished, and the cash story is several quarters from where it needs to be.

What this thesis does not tell you

A clean recovery narrative has gaps, and the honest list is short:

• Margin still negative. A -6.1% operating margin is improvement, not profit. Multiple quarters of further narrowing are required before the program-level cash margins flow through to the consolidated income statement.
• Defense and space remains a drag. Boeing’s defense business has had persistent program-cost overruns. A commercial-side recovery doesn’t automatically extend there.
• Backlog quality matters more than size. A record backlog includes long-dated orders that depend on airline financial health and route economics. Backlog is not future revenue with certainty.
• The Airbus comparison is one quarter. One Q1 2026 beat does not undo two-plus years of Airbus share gain. The competitive picture across the next 8-12 quarters is what matters.
• No clean-sheet program means no insurance. Boeing is sustaining the duopoly with derivatives of the 737 and 787. A successor decision is required eventually, and that decision restarts the capital cycle Arment warned against.

How Boeing’s 2025-2026 trajectory compares with the recent past

Year	Commercial deliveries	Notable context
2018	806	pre-MAX-grounding peak
2019	380	MAX grounding mid-year
2020	157	COVID demand collapse
2021	340	initial recovery
2022	480	737 ramp resumes
2023	528	quality issues surface
2024	~348	door-plug incident, production halts
2025	600	best year since 2018

The 2024 trough at roughly 348 is the floor of the recent cycle. The 2025 result at 600 is a clean bounce. Whether 2026 holds at or above that pace is the open question. By Arment’s read, the answer is yes through 2028-2029, then plateau.

FAQ

What did Peter Arment forecast for Boeing in 2016?

By his own account on The Real Eisman Playbook, his 2016 pitch was that Boeing would earn approximately $40 per share in free cash flow by the early 2020s. The actual outcome was very different because of the 737 MAX grounding and the COVID demand shock.

What is Arment’s production cadence forecast?

“Sustained high levels of production 28-29 somewhere in there”, meaning 2028 to 2029 as the production plateau. Beyond that, he expects deliveries to stay at a high run-rate “without unless there’s some sort of like macro event risk that takes demand off the table.”

How big was the 787 cost overrun?

Boeing budgeted approximately $15B to develop the 787 and brought it to market in 2011. Total spend was roughly $30B. The airplane is excellent; the program returns a low single-digit margin across the totality of the investment.

Did Boeing beat Airbus in Q1 2026?

Yes. 143 commercial aircraft delivered to Airbus’s 114, the strongest Q1 for Boeing since 2019, per AIAA’s Q1 2026 reporting.

Where can I read Boeing directly?

Boeing’s investor relations page hosts the 10-K, 10-Q, and quarterly earnings materials. Arment’s published research is at Baird.