Record profit, negative cash — and €5.7bn of free cash flow still to find

Methodology

This index answers one question: Airbus guides to about 870 deliveries in 2026 and had delivered 418 by 31 July. Can it deliver the remaining 452 in five months? Every chart is an input to that arithmetic — the company’s historical annual pace, its year-end surge behaviour, which product lines the ramp actually runs through, what rates have been announced, how deep the queue is, and what the cash position implies. It contains no Boeing comparison; that is /data/narrowbody-deliveries. BASIS. Deliveries are commercial aircraft handed over to customers, the basis Airbus uses in its monthly Orders & Deliveries report. Helicopters and Defence & Space are excluded throughout. Financials are as reported in the H1 2026 release: EBIT Adjusted is Airbus’s own alternative performance measure and free cash flow is before customer financing. CAVEAT — GUIDANCE IS NOT AN ACTUAL. The 452 bar is a remainder computed against a guidance figure of about 870, and the guidance carries a practical range of roughly 850-890. At the low end the requirement falls to about 432 — still above Airbus’s best completed August-to-December finish of 420. The 2026 year is deliberately excluded from the annual delivery series so that no forecast sits in a chart of actuals. CAVEAT — RATE TARGETS ARE TARGETS. Every value in the rate chart is a stated management target with a future date: A320 family 70-75 a month by end-2027, A220 rate 13 in 2028, A350 rate 12 in 2028, A330 rate 5 in 2029. For scale, the realised 2025 monthly averages were 50.6, 7.8, 4.8 and 3.0 respectively. Not one target date falls inside the current guidance year, so none of them affects the 2026 number. CAVEAT — BACKLOG MEASUREMENT GAP, DISCLOSED. The per-family backlog figures sum to 9,352 at 31 July 2026. Airbus’s own cumulative orders and deliveries table implies 9,358 at the same point — a six-aircraft difference arising from slightly different cut-off conventions. Six aircraft on 9,352 is 0.06% and changes nothing here; it is disclosed because a source that hides small discrepancies should not be trusted with large ones. CAVEAT — DECEMBER SURGE IS STRUCTURAL. Aircraft revenue is recognised on handover and both parties have reasons to concentrate handovers at year end, so December is roughly double a normal month by design. The point of that chart is not that December is large; it is that the pace 2026 requires — 90.4 a month — is a December number needed for five consecutive months, and only December 2024 and December 2025 have ever exceeded it even once. CAVEAT — CASH AND DELIVERIES ARE ONE RISK. Full-year guidance of about €4.5bn in free cash flow requires roughly €5.7bn of second-half inflow against the €1.166bn consumed in H1. That inflow is generated by the same 452 deliveries. Do not treat the delivery risk and the cash-flow risk as independent — they are the same risk counted twice. Compiled and verified 2026-08-14. Working sheet with every source passage: Topics_Content/data/batch-6_aerospace_2026-08-14.md