The most common plane flown by airlines: why it is almost certainly a Boeing 737

If you board a short-haul flight at random, the odds are good you are stepping onto a Boeing 737. Across the fleets of the world's leading airlines in 2016, it was the single most common aircraft in the sky — roughly one airliner in four.

The finding comes from a count of every aircraft flown by the Skytrax top-100 airlines, built from fleet records in April 2016. Across those carriers, 12,841 aircraft were logged. The Boeing 737 topped the list with 3,337 aircraft in operation — about 26% of the total. The Airbus A320 was a clear second at 2,498 aircraft (19.5%). No other single model came close.

That dominance is not a quirk of one sample. The 737 was, at the time, the most-produced commercial jet in history — a title it would hold for 58 years and only surrender in 2025. The A320 was the challenger closing the gap. Together the two narrow-body families defined, and still define, what most passengers actually fly.

Boeing versus Airbus: a near dead heat

Zoom out from individual models to manufacturers and the 2016 picture is startlingly even. Of the 12,841 aircraft counted, Boeing built about 45.8% and Airbus about 45.7% — a difference of only a handful of airframes. Every other manufacturer combined held roughly 8%, with Embraer the largest of them at just over 3%. The narrow-body duopoly was, and remains, the defining feature of the commercial fleet.

The 737's lead over the A320 in that snapshot came down to a head start. The 737 first flew in 1967 and entered service in 1968; the A320 did not arrive until 1988. Two extra decades of production, plus a very deep order book from low-cost carriers, is what put roughly 800 more 737s in the air than A320s as of 2016.

Two aircraft families — the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320 — accounted for about 45% of every airliner flown by the world's top 100 carriers.

Why the 737 became the workhorse

The 737 is a short-to-medium-haul narrow-body: cheap to run, quick to turn around, and sized for exactly the routes that carry the most passengers. Low-cost carriers built entire businesses on a single 737 type — Southwest Airlines, for example, flew nothing else, with a fleet of 710 aircraft in the 2016 count. Standardising on one model cuts training, maintenance and spare-parts costs, which is why the 737 multiplied so fast.

Wide-bodies tell the opposite story. The Boeing 777 was third overall in 2016 with 1,131 aircraft, and the Boeing 747 — long the industry's flagship — had fallen to about 309 in service, roughly 2.4% of the fleet, as airlines retired four-engined jets in favour of more efficient twins.

What has changed since 2016

The 2016 ranking captured a lead that was already narrowing. Since then the Airbus A320 family has caught and passed the 737 on the measures that matter: it overtook the 737 in total fleet size around 2017, in cumulative orders in October 2019, and — after the 737 MAX groundings slowed Boeing's output — in total deliveries in 2025. The 737 had been the first jetliner to reach 10,000 deliveries, in March 2018; the A320 crossed the all-time delivery record seven years later.

Even so, the practical answer to "what is the most common plane flown by airlines" has barely moved. Both families now number well over 20,000 aircraft built between them, and each has on the order of 9,000 in service worldwide. Board a short-haul flight today and it is still almost certainly a 737 or an A320 — the two are simply closer than ever.

The most common models at a glance (2016)

• Boeing 737 — 3,337 aircraft, about 26% of the fleet counted.
• Airbus A320 — 2,498 aircraft, about 19.5%.
• Boeing 777 — 1,131 aircraft, about 8.8%.
• Airbus A330 — 1,000 aircraft, about 7.8%.
• Airbus A321 — 936 aircraft, about 7.3%.

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