Air Astana Prepares Major Boeing 787-9 Deal

Following Kazakhstan President Qasym-Jomart Toqayev’s official visit to Washington, the two sides signed several agreements totaling $17 billion. One of the largest involved leasing 15 Boeing 787-9 aircraft. Air Astana has now begun preparations for this deal, reports Orda.kz.

The company has scheduled a shareholder meeting for January 15 in Almaty, with a single agenda item: approval of a transaction to acquire Boeing 787-9 aircraft.

The memo published on the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange website does not specify either the cost or the structure of the deal. It is assumed the aircraft will be leased, with the price calculated unusually — as a percentage of the company’s total assets.

According to Air Astana’s latest financial report for 2024, the book value of its assets is 952 billion tenge, nearly one trillion. This means the airline would effectively secure the lease using roughly half of its asset base.

There is no official price for the aircraft, as Boeing stopped releasing price lists five years ago. The last list, in 2019, put the 787-9 at $292.5 million. Based on that outdated figure, half a trillion tenge would have covered only four aircraft in 2019.

In 2025, accounting for Kazakh and global inflation, the same amount would cover roughly three, and prices have likely risen since then.

Meanwhile, Air Astana still has not received the three Boeing 787-9s it announced in 2022. Deliveries are scheduled from early 2025 to spring 2026.

On November 1, 2022, Air Lease Corporation (ALC) announced a long-term lease agreement for three new Boeing 787-9s for Air Astana, with deliveries planned from early 2025 to spring 2026 through ALC’s existing Boeing order book. Air Astana later confirmed this on its website, noting that the first aircraft were expected in the first half of 2025.

Between 2024 and 2025, the company repeatedly revised the delivery date for the first aircraft due to manufacturer delays: first promising the end of 2025, then the first quarter of 2026, and later the second half of 2026.

These updates were reflected in industry publications and databases.

Aviationweek also reports that delays in launching long-awaited direct flights from Kazakhstan to the United States are directly linked to Air Astana’s continued inability to obtain these three overdue aircraft.

Original Author: Ilya Astakhov