Boeing secured orders for nearly 1,200 commercial planes last year, topping European rival Airbus for the first time since 2018, according to figures released Tuesday.The US aviation giant booked 175 orders in December, taking the total for 2025 to 1,173. Airbus on Monday disclosed net orders of 889 aircraft for the year.Boeing still lags behind Airbus in terms of the total number of undelivered planes following stumbles in the wake of fatal 2018 and 2019 crashes of the 737 MAX that have weighed on the US company.But Boeing on Tuesday also received a boost from an order by Delta Air Lines to purchase 30 Boeing 787 Dreamliner, with options for 30 more of the widebody jet.Delta CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC that the company was the only major US carrier without the popular plane but it was “confident” based on Boeing’s efforts under Kelly Ortberg, who joined as chief executive in 2024.”Watching the progress that the team has made, we realize that turnaround is still in midst,” Bastian said.Delta’s order was not included in Boeing’s 2025 figures. – Progress with FAA -The improvement in orders marks the latest sign of progress for Boeing after a bruising 2024. Last year opened with a near-catastrophic emergency landing on an Alaska Airlines flight in January, and concluded with the restart of plane production in the Seattle region following a lengthy labor strike.After the Alaska Airlines incident, Boeing fortified its quality control and manufacturing operations under close scrutiny by the US Federal Aviation Administration.In October, the FAA granted approval to Boeing to increase production on the 737 MAX to 42 per month from 38, a key sign of progress.”Our team did great work throughout 2025 to improve the on-time delivery of safe, quality airplanes to our customers to support their growth and modernization plans,” said Boeing commercial plane chief Stephanie Pope.”We’re focused on getting better every day and building on the momentum in the year ahead.”Boeing said it delivered 63 planes in December, taking the annual total to 600 for all of 2025.While that figure marked the most since 2018 and a big jump from the strike-plagued 2024 season, it came in well below the 793 delivered by Airbus.Airbus has dominated deliveries in recent years in the aftermath of the two crashes of Boeing 737 MAX planes that occurred in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Airbus also still holds a sizeable advantage in terms of orders, pointing to a backlog of 8,754 at the end of 2025.Boeing currently lists 6,720 unfilled orders with a backlog of 6,130 after an adjustment under US accounting standards.Morningstar analyst Nicolas Owens said the 2025 result was positive for Boeing, but needs to be weighed against the accumulated orders, which is a “better benchmark,” he said.Boeing’s outpacing of Airbus’ orders in 2025 is “a nice bit of news for Boeing, but it is just one year in a competition for a very large market that plays out over decades,” Owens said in an email to AFP.Boeing shares rose 2.0 percent.

Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Alabama in 1955 and became a US civil rights pioneer, has died aged 86, her foundation said Tuesday.Colvin, then aged 15, made her protest several months before Rosa Parks’ similar act of defiance became a key moment in the birth of the modern civil rights movement in the United States.Colvin “leaves behind a legacy of courage that helped change the course of American history,” her foundation said.Colvin had been studying Black history in school on March 2, 1955, when she was detained after she refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a bus in Montgomery — the same southern US city where Parks’ protest made headlines.”I remained seated because the lady could have sat in the seat opposite me,” Colvin told reporters in Paris in April 2023.”She refused because…a white person wasn’t supposed to sit close to a negro.” “People ask me why I refused to move, and I say history had me glued to the seat,” Colvin said.Colvin was briefly imprisoned for disturbing public order. The following year, she became one of four Black female plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit challenging segregated bus seating in Montgomery. The case was successful, impacting public transportation throughout the United States, including trains, airplanes and taxis.Colvin’s role in the US civil rights movement was less celebrated than that of Parks, who was already a key figure in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at the time of her arrest.Parks’ arrest triggered a year-long bus boycott in Montgomery that thrust civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence.The civil rights movement led to significant advances for Black people in the mid-1960s — ending legal segregation and securing their voting rights.Colvin, who was born in Alabama in 1939 as the eldest of eight sisters, would be ostracized from the civil rights movement when she became pregnant out of wedlock. She spent decades in obscurity, working for 30 years at a Catholic nursing home, caring for elderly patients as a nursing assistant.But she won recognition later in life. A 2009 biography by Phillip Hoose, “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” won the US National Book Award for young people’s literature.However, it was only in 2021 that the record of her 1955 arrest and adjudication of delinquency was expunged by a US court.