The past several years have not been kind to U.S. aerospace company Boeing. Its 737 Max airliner was grounded between March 2019 and December 2020 after two of the jets crashed in less than five months, killing 346 people. Then in January 2024, a panel covering an unused emergency exit blew out at 16,000 feet and opened a large hole in the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9. Although passengers’ belongings were sucked out of the plane, the seats next to the hole were empty, so nobody was seriously hurt.
The door-plug incident earned the 737 Max another grounding for about three weeks in early 2024 while aircraft were checked for the missing bolts that caused the panel to detach. Even more recently, the National Transportation Safety Board issued a warning over certain variants of the 737 MAX’s engines leaking smoke into the cabin or cockpit following a bird strike — yikes!
Finally, there’s the fresh Air India Boeing 787 crash, which killed all but one of the 242 people on board, as well as at least 29 on the ground. It’s too early to determine cause of the Air India crash, but just the fact that it was another Boeing plane is enough to make some nervous flyers even more paranoid. So if your goal is to avoid Boeing planes, which U.S.-based airlines have the largest Boeing fleets? Let’s take a look.
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Some Airlines Are 100% Boeing
A Southwest Airlines jet in mid-air. – Boarding1now/Getty Images
For starters, Boeing haters will want to steer clear of Southwest Airlines. That’s because the carrier’s entire fleet is composed of Boeing jets, all 803 of them. Granted, some flyers will now be avoiding Southwest anyway because recent policy changes removed most of what loyal customers loved about the airline — for example, free checked bags and the quirky boarding system.
Even though Southwest has an all-Boeing fleet, it’s not the largest U.S. operator of Boeing products. That honor goes to United Airlines, which flies no less than 843 Boeing jets according to the most recent information from the civil aviation database Planespotters. With a total fleet size of 1,038 jets, that’s 81% built by Boeing. The remaining 19% of United’s fleet come’s from Boeing’s competitor, Airbus.
The distribution at both American Airlines and Delta is a little more balanced between the two largest airplane manufacturers; Boeing and Airbus. Once again referencing Planespotters’ data, American operates 510 Boeing jets out of a total fleet size of 992 aircraft. Over at Delta Airlines, 487 jets are made by Boeing out of the carrier’s 989 total airframes.
Low-Cost Carriers Skew Toward Airbus
Several Spirit Airlines airplanes lined up in a row. – Leonard Zhukovsky/Shutterstock
To be sure, airlines’ fleets are in a constant state of flux, so the information presented may no longer be accurate down to the very last plane in the coming months, or even weeks. That said, it’s safe to generalize that when flying with the three largest U.S. carriers, your chances of traveling on a jet manufactured by Boeing range from approximately 50% up to 80%. Of course, that excludes America’s fourth-largest carrier, Southwest, and its all-Boeing stable.
To fully avoid Boeing products, it’s worth noting that U.S.-based low-budget carriers Frontier Airlines and Spirit Airlines operate all-Airbus fleets, with no Boeing jets whatsoever. If the concept of ultra-low-cost carriers and their myriad of fees for things like baggage isn’t appealing to you, JetBlue also operates a mostly Airbus fleet, including to and from several cities in Europe and South America. We say “mostly” because JetBlue does operate a handful of smaller Embraer regional jets for short hops.
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