Boeing handed over 881 Dreamliners between 2016 and 2025 — but the cadence collapsed from 156 a year to just 14, and the recovery is still incomplete. The delivery chart is really an industrial-health chart.
Order books get the headlines, but deliveries are where aviation's money actually moves: the airframer books revenue, the airline takes the asset, the lessor starts the lease. Which is why a delivery-cadence chart is one of the most honest documents in the industry. It can't be spun. Either the aircraft left the factory or it didn't.
From 2016 to 2019 the programme ran hot and steady: 137, 133, 145, then a peak of 156 deliveries in 2019. Then the floor gave way. 2020 fell to 53 as the pandemic emptied the widebody market — and 2021 fell to 14, the canyon floor, as fuselage-join quality findings halted handovers almost entirely. 2022 managed only 31. Across those three years combined, Boeing delivered 98 Dreamliners — fewer than in 2019 alone.
The climb back out has been real but uneven: 73 in 2023, a dip to 51 in 2024 as inspection scrutiny returned, then 88 in 2025 — the best year since the canyon, yet still barely half the 2019 peak. That's the story the stacked bars tell at a glance: not a dip, a crater with switchback trails out of it.
Underneath the totals, the family quietly picked its winner. The mid-size 787-9 took 637 of the 881 deliveries — 72% of the entire decade. The smaller -8, the launch variant, faded to almost nothing: 108 across the decade and just 2 in 2025. The stretched -10 is the growth story, taking 19 of 2025's 88 deliveries. The market voted for the middle of the seesaw: enough range to open long-thin routes, enough seats to make them pay.
Slice the same data by operator continent and one region dominates: Asia took 443 of the 881 aircraft — just over half of every 787 delivered in the decade. Europe and North America split most of the rest, with 2025 showing North America's strongest -9 intake (23 aircraft) since the peak years. Africa, Oceania and South America remain thin, single-digit markets for the type.
This dataset is three-dimensional — year × variant × continent — and the classic mistake is to flatten it into a grid of tiny multiples nobody reads. Instead, the chart keeps one strong time axis and lets you re-slice the stack interactively: hover any segment for the exact count, switch the grouping, and the canyon stays visible in every view because the total height is the constant anchor. The unit never changes: one aircraft, delivered. No indices, no smoothing — the 14 of 2021 should look as brutal as it was.
One row per year, then one column for each series you want as its own panel — here, each aircraft variant. Long format (year, series, value) works just as well.
| year | 787-8 | 787-9 | 787-10 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 73 | 64 | 0 |
| 2020 | 4 | 9 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2 | 10 | 2 |
Novice tip: keep each series in its own column (or its own labelled rows) rather than mashing everything into one — the agent splits the small-multiple panels and puts them on a shared axis so they're honestly comparable. No need to pre-total the rows.
Delivery cadence is the vital sign of an aircraft programme. The 787's chart shows a decade with a two-year industrial crisis in the middle, a recovery that is genuine but still incomplete, and a variant decision the market made unambiguously. If you follow one Boeing number through 2026, make it this one: the distance between 88 and 156.
Working with delivery, order or fleet data of your own? Drop it into the Nomogram Lab agent for three chart proposals on your real numbers, browse the portfolio — including the Airbus production-flow story — or read about bespoke commissions.