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A 17,000-aircraft backlog, the oldest fleet ever recorded and a $136 billion repair bill: aviation’s delivery crisis has produced a winner, and it does not build planes. It fixes their engines.
Airbus wanted to build 75 A320s a month by 2027. It managed 54 at the end of 2025. Boeing targeted 57 monthly 737s this year; regulators cleared 42. The unfilled order backlog now tops 17,000 aircraft, roughly 14 years of production at current rates, and the average airliner is 13.4 years old, up from 12.1 a year earlier. Airlines waiting for jets that will not arrive are doing the only thing left: flying the old ones harder.
That decision has a price tag. Global maintenance, repair and overhaul spending reached $136 billion in 2025, up 8 percent in a single year, and Oliver Wyman projects it will approach $193 billion by 2030, nearly double pre-pandemic levels. The consultancy’s April survey found parts and labour shortages still the sector’s top disruptors, with tariffs and geopolitics debuting in second place, and estimates an annual shortfall of 12,000 to 18,000 maintenance technicians. New aircraft get the headlines. The money is flowing to whoever keeps the existing ones airworthy.
A $6 Billion Year
No company illustrates the shift better than StandardAero. The Scottsdale, Arizona group, founded in 1911, listed on the NYSE and roughly 8,000 people strong, does one thing: engine aftermarket work, from full overhaul to component repair and field support, for commercial, military and business aviation. In 2025 it grew revenue 16 percent to $6.06 billion and adjusted EBITDA 17 percent to $808 million, a year management called a record. Third-quarter revenue alone jumped 20.4 percent, with double-digit growth in all three end markets, and in May the company raised 2026 revenue guidance to as much as $6.45 billion, telling investors commercial demand shows no signs of softening.
Both Ends of the Engine Cycle
The order book spans two engine generations at once. On the legacy side, Safran, co-owner of engine maker CFM International, pegs CFM56 shop visits at a 2025 peak of roughly 2,300 and notes that about 40 percent of the 23,000 CFM56-5B and -7B engines in service have never had a heavy overhaul. Aircraft scheduled to retire are queuing for surgery instead, and StandardAero has overhauled the type since 2009.
On the new side, it moved early. The first non-airline CFM branded service agreement in the Americas for the LEAP, signed in March 2023, made it the region’s first independent LEAP Premier MRO provider. It has since completed its first full LEAP performance restoration on an AerCap engine, industrialised more than 475 LEAP component repairs, signed a 15-year LEAP support deal with a major Middle East airline, and in the past two weeks added SunExpress and Arajet to the customer list.
1,000 Engines for the Air Force
Beneath the commercial cycle sits defence work that rarely makes news but anchors the model. In November the company delivered its 1,000th J85 engine to the US Air Force, the powerplant of the T-38 jet every American fighter pilot trains on, five years into a multi-year contract. It also holds US Navy T56 depot work covering C-130, E-2 and P-3 fleets, and supports F110 engines for international F-15 and F-16 operators.
The Costs Cut Both Ways
The boom is not free money. The same scarcity inflating StandardAero’s order book inflates its own inputs, and new capability costs margin before it earns any. Engine Services margins fell 140 basis points in the first quarter of 2026 as the LEAP line and a new Dallas CFM56 shop climbed their learning curves, the US government shutdown pushed military revenue out of the fourth quarter and into the first, and a fire closed its Phoenix component plant for several weeks. Management expects both new programmes to turn profitable in the first half of 2026 and is stripping $300 million to $400 million of near-zero-margin passthrough revenue out of the business this year. The supercycle pays, but it makes you earn it.
None of the forces behind it are reversing soon. Boeing and Airbus will spend years working off the backlog, fleets will keep aging while they do, and every extra year on wing is another shop visit. Aviation’s shortage has always been told as a story about aircraft that do not exist. The more durable story is a $6 billion business built on the ones that already do.
