Airbus Enters March With Four Orders and 103 Cancellations
Cancellations last month included 42 A350 wide-bodies jettisoned by unprofitable Persian Gulf carrier Etihad Airways.
(Bloomberg) -- Two months into 2019, Airbus SE has logged cancellations for 103 jetliners and garnered a grand total of four new sales -- and those orders were for the A220 plane manufactured in Canada by Bombardier Inc.
The deal for the A220s -- formerly the Bombardier C Series -- with Pacific Ocean carrier Air Vanuatu represented Airbus’s only new business in February and broke an order drought in January.
Cancellations last month included 42 A350 wide-bodies jettisoned by unprofitable Persian Gulf carrier Etihad Airways and 25 single-aisle A320neos that had been ordered by Germania, which has filed for bankruptcy.
February also featured 23 cancellations for the A380 superjumbo after Airbus said the flagship program would be wound up early: 20 at leasing firm Amedeo and three originally ordered by Russia’s now defunct Transaero and later assigned to Air Accord.
Those losses follow the scrapping in January of eight A380 orders at Australia’s Qantas Airways and five A220s contracted to a private buyer.
Airbus said it won’t record the cancellation of 39 A380s at Dubai-based Emirates until details are finalized. That should also allow it to book its first major orders this year, for 30 A350s and 40 smaller A330neos that the Persian Gulf carrier has said it will buy.
To contact the reporter on this story: Christopher Jasper in London at cjasper@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Palazzo at apalazzo@bloomberg.net, Tony Robinson
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