Airbus A350F First Delivery Target of H2 2027 Under Threat as 107 Orders Accumulate

Airbus has confirmed the A350F will make its first flight later in 2026, with first delivery targeted for the second half of 2027. Industry sources cited by Reuters warn that flight trials typically take 12 to 15 months, leaving little margin for setbacks before that deadline, while Leeham News has reported that 2028 may be a more realistic first-delivery date.

Airbus currently holds 107 orders for the A350F. Atlas Air is the largest single customer with 20 aircraft on order, followed by Air China Cargo and Starlux Airlines, each with roughly half that number. Cathay Pacific's freight division has ordered eight jets — six placed in December 2023 and two added earlier this year — and the airline's chief operations and service delivery officer, Alex McGowan, told Air Cargo News he expects Cathay Pacific's first delivery to be delayed by about six months, though still within its original 2027–2029 delivery window.

Airbus chief executive Guillaume Faury has acknowledged the programme has already slipped from a planned 2025 entry into service, attributing delays partly to supply-chain and geopolitical difficulties. A key source of disruption is the Airbus Aerosystems plant in Kinston, North Carolina — a 500,000-square-foot facility employing around 1,000 people — acquired from Spirit AeroSystems in December 2025. The plant manufactures fuselage panels and wing spar structures shipped to France for final assembly.

The A350F features a carbon-fibre composite airframe, Rolls-Royce Trent XWB engines, and a main-deck cargo door measuring 14 feet 1 inch (4.3 m) wide and 10 feet 4 inches (3.15 m) tall. Airbus claims a 20% fuel-efficiency improvement over comparable widebodies, or 40% versus Boeing 747 freighters. The first main-deck cargo door was delivered to Airbus's Illescas, Spain facility in April, to be moved to Hamburg for integration into the aft fuselage before that section is transported to Toulouse for final assembly.

The A350F's principal competitor, the Boeing 777-8F, has also yet to complete its first flight. Its backlog exceeded 80 aircraft in August, including five ordered by MSC Air Cargo at the Farnborough International Air Show. Entry into service for the 777-8F is now projected for 2029, two years later than originally planned, and Boeing faces a 2028 legislative deadline tied to new ICAO emissions rules.

Some A350F customers, including Silk Way West, have hedged by placing orders for both types.

Slippage on a new freighter programme is not unusual, but the scale here — 107 A350F orders against a flight-test clock that leaves almost no room for error — shows how exposed large-cargo-aircraft launches remain to single points of failure deep in the supply chain. The Kinston plant's fuselage panels and wing spar structures moving through Spain, Hamburg and Toulouse illustrate how one recently acquired facility can set the pace for an entire global order book.

Cargo carriers with widebody freighter orders typically build delivery windows with multi-year buffers precisely because these programmes rarely land on the first-announced date; Cathay Pacific's own six-month slip forecast, still inside its 2027–2029 window, reflects that built-in slack rather than a crisis. The parallel slippage at Boeing, whose 777-8F now faces a 2029 entry into service against a 2028 emissions-rule deadline, suggests the delay pattern is systemic to this aircraft class rather than specific to one manufacturer.

The next marker to watch is whether the A350F actually flies in 2026 as stated, since a miss there would test the credibility of the 2027 delivery target against outside estimates pointing to 2028.