The Inflation of Aircraft Unit Costs

Since 1985, the cost of buying a new commercial aircraft has risen 253%, 4X the inflation of a new car.

It’s also well above core inflation.

At the same time:
❌  Aircraft aren’t faster (in fact, they fly slightly slower)
❌  They’re not dramatically cheaper to operate (~0.5% improvement per year)
❌  Efficiency has improved only marginally (~1% per year)
❌  Passenger comfort has declined (~10% less legroom)
✅  The one clear gain is safety, and that must always remain non-negotiable (global fatalities dropped from ~1.5 to ~0.05 per million passengers).

This is the paradox. Despite higher production volumes and decades of accumulated know-how, commercial aircraft have grown more expensive without delivering proportional gains in performance.

As global demand for air travel surges, this cost inflation has become a barrier, not just to airlines, but to society’s ability to connect affordably and sustainably.

With the next two decades set to see more people fly than in all of human history, the central question for our industry is this:

How do we relearn to not only develop, but mass-produce aircraft at radically lower cost, without compromising the safety gains we’ve worked so hard to achieve?

Because if we can’t answer that, the future of flying risks looking a lot like the past…just more expensive.
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*Inflation data from US Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Data are a weighted average, by revenue, of US civilian aircraft manufacturers.  Boeing’s (and in the 1980s and 1990s, McDonnell Douglas’) disproportionately large revenue compared to others like Cessna, Beechcraft, Gulfstream, etc., and the shared, western-dominated supply chain, means that it effectively tracks the global inflation of all commercial aircraft.