Remember when Boeing couldn’t catch a break? Door plugs blowing out mid-flight, production freezes, billions burning every quarter – it felt like the company was stuck in a tailspin with no clear way out. Then, out of nowhere on a random Tuesday morning in December 2025, the CFO steps up at a conference and says the words investors have been waiting years to hear. More planes. Real cash coming in. And suddenly the stock jumps seven percent before lunch.
I’ve followed Boeing long enough to know these moments don’t happen by accident. When a company that hasn’t made an annual profit since 2018 starts talking about positive free cash flow – even if it’s just “low single digits” – people listen. Really listen.
Why Boeing Needed This Win So Badly
Let’s be honest – the last few years have been brutal. The 737 MAX grounding, the pandemic, supply-chain chaos, a machinist strike that dragged on forever, and then the Alaska Airlines incident that put the entire production system under a microscope again. Every time it looked like the corner was turned, something else went wrong.
By mid-2025, many investors had basically written Boeing off as a permanent value trap. Great brand, terrible execution. A cash furnace disguised as an aerospace giant. The stock traded like a company that might never dig itself out of the hole.
Then October happened. Deliveries started climbing. The FAA quietly began easing some of the harsher inspection rules that had choked production. And now, heading into 2026, management finally feels confident enough to put numbers on the recovery.
The Magic Words: “Increasing Deliveries”
When Boeing’s CFO told analysts that both 737 and 787 deliveries will be higher next year, that wasn’t just corporate speak. That was the clearest signal yet that the production lines are actually stabilizing.
“When you now fast forward to 2026, we’re going to be increasing our deliveries.”
Boeing CFO, December 2025
Translation? After years of moving sideways (or backward), Boeing is finally getting permission – from regulators, from its own quality systems, from suppliers – to build and ship more airplanes. And each one of those airplanes is worth roughly $50–$120 million depending on the model and the deal.
Do the math. Even a modest bump of 50–70 extra deliveries across the two lines adds billions in revenue. That’s real money hitting the balance sheet instead of more write-offs and penalties.
Cash Flow – The Stat Everyone Obsessed Over
Forget earnings per share for a second. In Boeing’s world right now, the metric that matters most is free cash flow. The company has been bleeding anywhere from $3 billion to $11 billion a year since 2019. Wall Street basically priced the stock assuming that hemorrhage would never fully stop.
Hearing the CFO guide to positive free cash flow in 2026 – even if it’s only a couple billion – flips the entire narrative. Suddenly Boeing isn’t just a turnaround story. It’s a company that might actually start paying down debt, resuming dividends someday, or at least stop diluting shareholders to stay alive.
- Burn rate → zero (or better)
- Debt mountain → maybe starts shrinking
- Balance sheet → finally starts healing
- Stock valuation → suddenly looks cheap instead of broken
No wonder the stock gapped up hard.
737 MAX: The Cash Cow Waking Up
The 737 family has always been Boeing’s bread and butter. Before everything went sideways, the company was cranking out 50+ narrow-body jets a month. Then the MAX crashes happened, production crashed to almost nothing, and even after the return-to-service, the FAA capped output at 38 planes per month while quality issues got sorted.
Fast-forward to now: the cap is still technically there, but Boeing has been delivering at the high end of what’s allowed, and October was the best month in years. The pipeline is stuffed with over 4,000 unfilled 737 orders. Airlines are desperate for planes. All Boeing has to do is execute.
And apparently, management finally believes they can.
787 Dreamliner: From Headache to Tailwind
The 787 story is almost the opposite. Production never fully stopped, but deliveries were frozen for nearly two years because of tiny gaps in fuselage joints that nobody could see but the FAA cared about deeply. In the meantime, Boeing kept building planes and parking them in the desert.
Now those “whitetails” are being worked off, inspection processes are streamlined, and the line is slowly ramping again. The 787 has some of the best margins in Boeing’s portfolio when things run smoothly. Every extra Dreamliner delivered goes almost straight to the bottom line.
The 737-10 Wildcard That Could Change Everything
One comment that flew a bit under the radar: certification of the 737-10 – the largest MAX variant – is now expected in the back half of 2026. That plane has been delayed so many times people stopped believing it would ever fly commercially.
But when it finally gets the green light, it unlocks hundreds of orders and gives airlines a true Airbus A321neo competitor again. The pricing power and margin profile on the -10 is significantly better than the smaller MAX models. If Boeing nails that launch, 2027–2028 could look dramatically different.
What Still Keeps Me Up at Night
Look, I’m excited. The chart looks great, the story is improving, and the valuation is still reasonable compared to historical levels. But this is Boeing we’re talking about. Execution risk is baked into the name at this point.
- Labor contracts come up again in a few years
- Supply chain is still fragile
- Geopolitical risks with China orders
- Defense & Space side remains a mess
- One more quality incident could set sentiment back months
In my experience, Boeing has a habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The difference this time? New CEO Kelly Ortberg seems to actually understand factory floor culture, and the quality fixes appear to be sticking. That’s not nothing.
Where the Stock Could Go From Here
If Boeing simply delivers (pun intended) on the 2026 guidance – higher volumes, positive cash flow, steady progress on certification – the stock could easily push past recent highs. Some analysts already have targets north of where we sit today just on the commercial aircraft recovery alone.
Longer term, if the company gets back to 500+ narrow-body deliveries and 100+ wide-bodies annually by the end of the decade, with decent pricing and normalized defense performance, we’re talking about a stock that could double from current levels without breaking a sweat.
Risks? Absolutely. But the risk/reward skew finally feels like it’s tilting in the right direction for the first time since 2018.
The Bottom Line
Tuesday wasn’t just another conference talking point. It felt like the moment the Boeing recovery story finally moved from hope to something closer to expectation. Planes are moving again. Cash should follow. And for a company that spent half a decade explaining why things were still broken, simply sounding boring and competent is the most bullish signal of all.
Will it be smooth from here? Probably not. But after everything investors have endured, a bumpy ride back to profitability feels a lot better than the nosedive we’ve been on.
Sometimes in this business, the best trades aren’t the ones that look perfect – they’re the ones where the worst news is finally priced in and reality starts exceeding painfully low expectations.
For Boeing, that moment might have just arrived.
