The Boeing 777-9 was supposed to be the airliner that finally cemented Boeing’s widebody recovery after the 787 debacle and the 737 MAX disaster. It was going to be the world’s largest twin-engined jet, the most efficient on a per-seat basis, the only credible direct rival to the Airbus A350-1000. It was supposed to be in service by 2020. Six years late and counting, the 777-9 has now collected its own special category of trouble: more than thirty completed airframes sitting in Everett storage that the airlines who ordered them no longer want to take.

Industry insiders have a name for it. The “terrible teens” — the 30-odd aircraft built between 2020 and 2024, certified to a now-superseded standard, with pre-production-quality construction and a known list of in-service modifications that will need to be retrofitted before any operator will accept delivery.

How a flagship became a problem

The 777-9 has been in development since 2013. Its development cycle has been dominated by problems Boeing did not anticipate: a six-month grounding of the prototype fleet in 2021 due to a thrust-link failure during ground testing, a re-engineered General Electric GE9X engine whose certification process repeatedly exposed durability problems, and an FAA certification regime that — in the wake of the 737 MAX disaster — has become more demanding than at any point since the 1990s.

While Boeing fought through those problems, it kept building airframes. Roughly thirty 777-9s rolled off the Everett production line between 2020 and 2024, each one going straight from final assembly into long-term storage at Paine Field, Moses Lake, or Boeing’s desert reserve at Victorville. They have been sitting in the Pacific Northwest weather for years.

Why airlines are saying no

The fundamental problem is that the certification standard the 777-9 will finally enter service to is materially different from the standard the early airframes were built to. The flight control software has changed. The engine control software has changed. Wiring routing has changed in several systems. The pre-2025 frames will need an expensive sequence of retrofits before any customer will accept them — and customers, having waited six years, are now in a much stronger negotiating position than they were when they signed their original purchase agreements.

Several customers — Emirates publicly, Qatar Airways and Lufthansa privately — have told Boeing they will not accept early-build airframes at any price unless Boeing absorbs the entire retrofit cost. Some are pushing further: they want completely new-build aircraft to the final production standard, and they want the stored airframes treated as a Boeing problem to be sold on, leased out, or written off.

What the “terrible teens” become

The industry’s assumption is that Boeing will eventually take a substantial financial writedown on the stored aircraft. Some may be retrofitted to current standard and offered to second-tier customers at heavy discount. Some may be converted to freighter configuration as 777-9F variants, where the certification differences matter less. A small number may end up in test or training roles. The rest may simply be parted out — a $450 million list-price aircraft reduced to its engines, landing gear, and avionics for resale as spares.

None of those outcomes are good for Boeing’s books. The 777-9 programme is already estimated to be over $10 billion in the red. The terrible teens add another $3-5 billion of inventory carrying cost and writedowns. For a company still recovering from the 737 MAX disaster and the 787 quality crisis, it is the kind of problem that does not get solved this decade.

The Airbus A350-1000 keeps winning

While Boeing has been trying to deliver the 777-9 since 2020, Airbus has been quietly delivering A350-1000s — over 130 of them now in service with operators including Qatar Airways, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Air France, and Lufthansa. The A350-1000 is a smaller aircraft than the 777-9, but it is real, available, and operating profitably. Every month Boeing fails to ship a 777-9 is another month Airbus picks up another long-haul widebody order that should have been Boeing’s.

Sources: Simple Flying; The Air Current; Reuters aviation desk; Boeing earnings filings.