Boeing orders continue to outpace cancellations, Dreamliner deliveries still paused

A Boeing plane sits on the tarmac at the Boeing South Carolina Plant in North Charleston, South Carolina, March 25, 2018.

Randall Hill | Reuters

Boeing's aircraft sales outpaced cancellations for a fourth consecutive month in May as customers like Southwest Airlines ordered more planes.

The manufacturer last month logged 73 new orders, more than 60 of them for its bestselling Max aircraft as well as wide-body passenger and freighter aircraft last month, Boeing said Tuesday. Customers Aeromexico and Norwegian Air Shuttle canceled Max orders while an unidentified customer axed orders for five 787 Dreamliners.

Deliveries in the month totaled 17. Boeing again halted deliveries of 787 planes last month as the Federal Aviation Administration reviews the planemaker's inspection methods. Handovers of those planes to customers, when Boeing usually collects the majority of a plane's price, had been paused for about five months until April because of production flaws.

"I don't think we're going to introduce as many changes as we did in this last five-month pause," Boeing's CEO, Dave Calhoun, said at Bernstein's Strategic Decisions Conference last week, regarding the latest Dreamliner delivery suspension. "So we don't regret any of that, but ... it would be unfair of us to shove it down the FAA's throat. That wouldn't be right."

Tensions between the FAA and Boeing over the 737 Max, which was grounded for 19 months after two fatal crashes, cost previous CEO Dennis Muilenburg his job in December 2019.

Boeing has 4,121 planes on backorder as of the end of May, up from 4,045 a month before.

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