A shorter Bangla companion piece, written for a general newspaper readership, is published as বিমান-বোয়িং চুক্তি.
Executive Summary: On April 30, 2026, the Tarique Rahman government (BNP, sworn February 17, 2026) signed a $3.7 billion sovereign-guaranteed contract for 14 Boeing aircraft, inheriting and trimming a 25-aircraft commitment made by the caretaker administration in August 2025. The deal's per-aircraft pricing reflects near-zero negotiating leverage: at $264 million per aircraft, Bangladesh's order sits in the same band as Indonesia's catalogue-priced tariff deal, well above the negotiated narrowbody figures Vietnam Airlines and Air India achieved. The fleet mix, eight 787-10 Dreamliners, is mismatched to Biman's route network: the 787-10 cannot reach New York direct, yet the 787-10 is the bulk of the new widebody capacity. Annual debt service of Tk 1,500 to 2,000 crore will exceed Biman's record annual net profit by a factor of roughly two. And Pakistan and Sri Lanka secured an equal or better tariff outcome with no aircraft commitment at all.
On April 30, 2026, Biman Bangladesh Airlines signed a contract with Boeing for 14 new aircraft worth a reported $3.7 billion. The signing was framed as the largest fleet expansion in the airline's history. It is not an aviation deal. It is the closing entry of a tariff negotiation that began in August 2025, when a caretaker government, facing a 37 percent reciprocal tariff threat from the Trump administration, offered to buy American jets in exchange for relief.
This piece sets out the case that the deal, on the terms publicly disclosed, is bad for Bangladesh on three converging grounds. It is geopolitically coerced, with worse terms than peer countries achieved. It is layered onto an operator with a documented record of corruption, route failure, and engineering collapse. And it is fiscally underwritten by a sovereign guarantee whose annual servicing cost exceeds the airline's record annual net profit by a factor of roughly two. None of these are arguments against owning Boeing aircraft. They are arguments against signing this contract, on this schedule, in this way, to be flown by this airline.
The deal at a glance
Under the agreement, Biman will purchase 14 aircraft: eight Boeing 787-10 Dreamliners, two 787-9 Dreamliners, and four 737-8 MAX narrowbodies. The first aircraft is scheduled for delivery in October 2031, more than five years from signing. The last is due in November 2035.
The deal originated in late July 2025, when Bangladesh's interim caretaker government offered to buy 25 Boeing jets as part of a tariff package modelled on a similar Indonesia agreement. The Trump administration had threatened a 37 percent reciprocal tariff on Bangladeshi exports. After negotiation, the United States set a reciprocal rate of 20 percent, layered on top of an existing 15 percent average duty, leaving Bangladeshi goods facing an effective US tariff of approximately 35 percent, later trimmed by one percentage point in February 2026. The aircraft order, alongside commitments to import US wheat, soybean oil, palm olein, LNG, and cotton, formed the consideration. The Tarique Rahman government (BNP, sworn February 17, 2026) inherited the obligation and trimmed the order from 25 aircraft to 14, confirming the reduced commitment and proceeding to signature on April 30.
Biman's existing fleet consists of 21 aircraft: six Boeing 787s, four Boeing 777-300ERs, four Boeing 737NGs, and five De Havilland Dash-8 Q400 turboprops. The carrier flies to 21 international and 7 domestic destinations and reported a record net profit of Tk 785 crore in FY 2024-25 on revenues of Tk 11,559 crore, with a cabin factor of 82 percent.
1. The pricing puzzle
The headline figure of $3.7 billion divided across 14 aircraft (8 × 787-10, 2 × 787-9, 4 × 737-8 MAX) implies an average per-aircraft contract value of approximately $264 million. Boeing has not published official list prices since 2018, so direct comparison to a sticker price is not possible. The honest test is comparison to recent disclosed transactions for the same airframes.
| Deal | Date | Aircraft | Total | Per-aircraft |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bangladesh-Boeing (this deal) | 2026-04 | 8 × 787-10, 2 × 787-9, 4 × 737-8 MAX | $3.7B | $264M |
| Vietnam Airlines | 2026-02 | 50 × 737-8 MAX | $7.8 to 8.1B | $156 to 162M |
| Air India | 2023-02 | 190 × 737 MAX, 20 × 787, 10 × 777X | $34B | $155M (avg) |
| Indonesia (Garuda + Lion) | 2025-07 | 50 mixed Boeing | $13.5B | $270M |
Two readings of this table are honest. The first is that Bangladesh's per-aircraft figure is roughly comparable to Indonesia's, which is to say that both buyers were apparently anchored to catalogue prices because both were operating under tariff coercion rather than competitive procurement. The Vietnam Airlines and Air India per-aircraft figures, both lower, reflect deeper narrowbody-heavy mixes (the 737 MAX is the cheapest variant in the family) and, in Air India's case, a competitive Airbus-Boeing tender that gave the buyer leverage. Bangladesh had neither narrowbody weighting nor a competitive tender.
The second reading is that the per-aircraft difference between Bangladesh ($264M) and Vietnam Airlines ($160M) on the same general airframe family is largely the mix effect of Bangladesh's 71 percent widebody weighting versus Vietnam Airlines' 100 percent narrowbody. Adjusting Bangladesh's mix mathematically: if the 14 aircraft had been weighted closer to Vietnam's pattern, with no 787-10s, the implied transaction value falls into the $2.0 to $2.5 billion range. The headline $3.7 billion is therefore not an "overpayment" against a fictional list, it is the consequence of an aircraft mix that loaded the order with the most expensive variant in the family.
The deal's price is what its mix says it is. The mix is what is wrong, not principally the price.
The public has nonetheless been given no information that would allow a competent independent assessment: no net contract value, no delivery-by-delivery payment schedule, no financing terms. A $3.7 billion sovereign-guaranteed obligation should not be announced without these.
2. What other countries paid for the same tariff
Bangladesh was not alone in being offered a tariff-for-aircraft trade. The Trump administration ran the same playbook with five Asian economies between July 2025 and March 2026. The outcomes are publicly comparable.
| Country | Threatened tariff | Final tariff | Boeing commitment | Aircraft | Per-aircraft value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vietnam | 46% | 20% | $30B+ across 3 carriers | 90+ | mixed |
| Indonesia | 32% | 19% | $13.5B | 50 | $270M |
| Bangladesh | 37% | 20% then 19% | $3.7B | 14 | $264M |
| Pakistan | 29% | 19% | None disclosed | 0 | n/a |
| Sri Lanka | 30% | 20% | None disclosed | 0 | n/a |
Two facts in this table do the analytical work.
Pakistan secured 19 percent without an aircraft commitment, but the Pakistan deal was not free. Reporting in Al Jazeera, Dawn, and Asia Times indicates Pakistan offered co-development of offshore oil reserves and signed a critical-minerals MOU with a US counterparty (Reko Diq-class assets). Those commitments are denominated in resource-access rather than cash, with longer extraction tails and arguably greater optionality, but they are not zero. No party has published a net present value for the Pakistan package, and this analysis does not estimate one: the inputs (extraction probabilities, capital schedules, commodity-price paths) are not in the public record, and any single figure would be guesswork dressed as a number.
The honest comparative claim is therefore not "Pakistan paid nothing." It is that Pakistan paid in a different currency, with different optionality and a longer realisation tail, for an outcome that ended up roughly one percentage point better on the tariff. Whether Pakistan's structure is preferable to Bangladesh's depends on three things: how reliably the US extracts the resource access (lower than Boeing extracts the aircraft cash), how Pakistan's domestic interests are affected (extractive concessions carry their own political cost), and what the timing mismatch looks like between commitment and benefit on each side. The two structures are different bets. The strongest claim Bangladesh's negotiators can make is that they chose visible, predictable cash over uncertain, contested resource access. The strongest claim against them is that they did not appear to have explored an in-kind alternative at all.
Per aircraft, Bangladesh's commitment is in the same range as Indonesia's, at $264 million versus $270 million. But Indonesia got the same number of percentage points of tariff relief Bangladesh did with 3.6 times more aircraft and 3.6 times more total value. That is roughly proportional. Bangladesh did not get the volume discount that comes with a larger order, but it also did not commit to a larger order. The deal is, in per-unit terms, no worse than Indonesia's, but no better either, despite Bangladesh entering the negotiation with a stronger relative export-dependence claim.
Vietnam is the outlier. Three Vietnamese carriers (Vietnam Airlines, VietJet, and Sun PhuQuoc) committed to over 90 Boeing aircraft worth more than $30 billion. The country's industrial base, larger US export footprint, and geopolitical positioning supported the larger commitment. Vietnam's tariff outcome (20 percent) is, however, no better than Bangladesh's. Vietnam's commitment is not a precedent Bangladesh should emulate. It is a precedent Bangladesh should have studied to negotiate downward, not matched at proportional scale.
The cleanest read of the comparative table is this: Pakistan and Sri Lanka got the same or better tariff outcome without buying any Boeing aircraft. Bangladesh's $3.7 billion was the price of, at most, one percentage point of marginal tariff relief over what the negotiation might have produced anyway. There is no public evidence that Bangladesh's negotiators tested whether a smaller order, or no order, would have yielded the same tariff floor.
3. The fleet that does not fit the network
Biman's route map is, by international standards, a medium-haul network with two long-haul exceptions. The carrier flies to London, Manchester, Rome, Toronto, Dubai, Doha, Riyadh, Jeddah, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Singapore, and a cluster of South and Southeast Asian destinations. The longest single route is Dhaka-Toronto, launched in 2023 and operated with 787-9s. The Manchester service was suspended in March 2026 and is scheduled to return in July as a twice-weekly Sylhet routing.
The 787-10 is the largest variant in the Dreamliner family. It carries roughly 330 passengers in two-class configuration and has a published maximum range of approximately 6,330 nautical miles, or 11,723 kilometres (Boeing 787 published specifications). It is optimised for high-density medium and long-haul routes of 6 to 12 hours, not for ultra long-haul. The 787-10 cannot operate Dhaka-New York direct. The great-circle distance is approximately 12,681 km, beyond the 787-10's range envelope even on the more generous published figure of 6,430 nm (11,910 km). Dhaka-Los Angeles (12,440 km) is similarly unreachable without weight-restricted operations or refuel stops. The 787-9, with a published range of 7,565 nm (14,010 km), can reach those city pairs. Biman already operates the 787-9 to Toronto via Rome (one stop).
The order's heavy weighting toward 787-10s, eight aircraft of fourteen, is therefore mismatched to Biman's network on different grounds than the obvious one. The 787-10 is not the right aircraft for the longest routes Biman might want to fly (it cannot reach them); it is the right aircraft for high-density medium-haul routes where 330-seat capacity meets reliable load factor support. Biman's medium-haul corridors (Gulf, Southeast Asia) are predominantly narrowbody routes today because they are frequency-driven, not capacity-driven. The carrier flies daily or twice-daily 737s to Riyadh, Jeddah, Dubai, and Bangkok because expat-worker demand is steady but each flight needs only 180 to 200 seats. Replacing twelve 737 frequencies a week with three 787-10 frequencies a week would mean each cancelled flight forces passengers to wait two more days, with no net capacity gain. The 787-10 fleet, as ordered, fits no corridor in Biman's network well.
A second mismatch sits on the narrowbody side. Four 737-8 MAX aircraft are insufficient to recapitalise the existing four 737NGs and meaningfully expand short-haul capacity. The MAX deliveries arrive between 2031 and 2035, by which time the existing 737NGs will be 20 to 25 years old. The order solves the replacement problem and adds zero net narrowbody growth. For a country with rising domestic and regional demand and a single legacy carrier holding limited market share against private operators like US-Bangla and Air Astra, the narrowbody share of the order is not ambitious. It is barely maintenance.
A defensible fleet plan, given Biman's existing route economics, would have been smaller and narrowbody-heavy: roughly two to four 787-9s, no 787-10s, and six 737-8 MAX, for a total order size of eight to ten aircraft rather than fourteen. That mix would replace ageing narrowbodies one-for-one, add modest domestic and regional capacity where demand is actually growing, and avoid committing to widebody utilisation that the route network does not currently support. The cost saving against the announced contract would, on the same per-aircraft pricing, run to $1.0 to 1.5 billion in principal, with proportionally lower sovereign-guarantee exposure.
4. Route economics and aircraft fit: a corridor analysis
The aviation industry evaluates fleet decisions in three quantities. Available Seat Kilometres (ASK) measures capacity: seats multiplied by distance flown. Revenue per Available Seat Kilometre (RASM) measures pricing power: ticket and ancillary revenue divided by ASK. Cost per Available Seat Kilometre (CASM) measures unit economics: total operating cost divided by ASK. The break-even load factor (BELF) is the passenger load factor at which RASM equals CASM, and it is the single most useful number for assessing whether an aircraft order makes sense on a particular network.
Biman's published FY 2024-25 figures imply a system-wide passenger revenue base of approximately Tk 10,000 to 10,500 crore against revenues of Tk 11,559 crore (cargo and other revenue make up the balance). On a fleet of 21 aircraft averaging 8 to 9 daily block hours at typical sector lengths, system ASK is in the order of 22 to 28 billion per year. The implied system-wide RASM is approximately Tk 0.4 to 0.5 per ASK, equivalent to roughly $0.03 to $0.04 per ASK at the Tk 122/USD rate used throughout this analysis. This is at the low end of the international flag-carrier range (per Belobaba, Odoni and Barnhart, The Global Airline Industry, 2nd ed. 2016), reflecting Biman's price-sensitive expatriate worker customer base and competition from Gulf hub-and-spoke carriers.
If 14 new aircraft are operated at industry-norm utilisation (widebodies at approximately 12 block hours per day, narrowbodies at approximately 10), the fleet-level capacity addition is substantial. By aircraft count alone this is a 67 percent expansion (14 additional aircraft on a base of 21). Translated to ASK (seats multiplied by kilometres flown), the addition is in the order of 14 to 16 billion ASK per year at typical sector-length and utilisation assumptions for each aircraft type, against a current system base of 22 to 28 billion, implying a 50 to 70 percent expansion in available seat-capacity. Even accounting for retirements over the delivery window (the four 737NGs almost certainly), net capacity growth remains very large. The exact figure depends on retirement assumptions Biman has not published.
This is the hard fact at the heart of the corridor analysis. The order is not "fleet renewal." It is, by ASK, the largest single capacity expansion Biman has ever attempted, and it is being attempted on a route map that is currently not growing at anything close to 50 to 70 percent.
A corridor-by-corridor view is the relevant test.
The Middle East corridor. Biman flies to Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Doha, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Sharjah, and Muscat. This is the airline's natural cash-flow base: approximately 10 million Bangladeshi expatriate workers in the GCC produce structural demand across all economic cycles, and the price-sensitive customer profile favours a flag carrier that competes on schedule and brand familiarity rather than premium service. Sector lengths are 4 to 6 hours, optimised for narrowbody operation. Industry CASM on widebody equipment over these distances runs approximately 30 to 50 percent above narrowbody CASM because the trip cost amortises over fewer seat-kilometres at suboptimal utilisation. The order's allocation of zero widebodies to Middle East trunk thickening and only four narrowbodies (just enough to replace the existing 737NGs) means the new fleet does not address the corridor that produces the strongest revenue. Six Middle East routes were suspended in 2024 over loss-making economics. The new aircraft do not directly fix this.
South and Southeast Asia. Biman flies to Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Kathmandu, Delhi, Kolkata, and Maldives. Sector lengths of 3 to 5 hours suit narrowbody operation. Yield is moderate, with substantial low-cost-carrier competition (AirAsia, Scoot, Vietjet, IndiGo, US-Bangla on regional). The order adds zero narrowbody capacity beyond replacement, leaving Biman with the same four narrowbodies (replaced by 737-8 MAX) and the same Dash-8 Q400 turboprop fleet. Capacity expansion in the corridor where regional aviation is growing fastest is therefore zero.
Europe. Biman flies to London Heathrow and intermittently Manchester (suspended March 2026). Rome operates as a technical stop on the Toronto routing. Sector lengths of 8 to 11 hours favour the 787-9, which Biman already operates. The 787-10 has more seats and slightly less range than the 787-9, which makes it a better fit for high-volume routes where load factor support is reliable. Bangladeshi diaspora to the United Kingdom is approximately 600,000 strong. Biman's London frequency is constrained more by Heathrow slots than by aircraft. Adding additional 787 capacity to London requires either extra slots, which are scarce and expensive, or growth on Manchester, which has been suspended. The European demand case for eight 787-10s is, on the published route map, weak.
North America. Biman operates Dhaka-Toronto via Rome (one stop) three times weekly on the 787-9. Direct service is not currently flown. New York has been suspended since 2006. The 787-10 ordered here, with its 11,723 km range, cannot operate Dhaka-New York or Dhaka-Los Angeles direct: both city-pairs sit beyond the variant's range envelope. The aircraft type for direct US service from Dhaka would be the 787-9 (14,010 km), the 777-300ER, or new ultra-long-range platforms (777-8, A350-1000ULR). Bangladesh ordered eight 787-10s and only two 787-9s. If the policy intent had been to enable direct North American service, the order is weighted toward the wrong frame. Two factors compound the mismatch. First, restart of any direct US service requires the Bangladesh Civil Aviation Authority securing FAA Category 1 status, which it does not currently hold; the FAA has previously fined Biman for rule breaches. Second, the Bangladeshi diaspora in the United States is approximately 700,000, with 100,000 in Canada (Bangladesh High Commission Ottawa estimate). Most diaspora travel funnels through Gulf hub carriers (Emirates, Qatar, Etihad) at price points Biman has not matched. The 787-10 fleet, as ordered, is well-suited neither to direct US service (range constraint) nor to one-stop service via Toronto (the 787-9 already does this competently with lower seat-count, hence better fill).
Domestic. Biman operates the Dash-8 Q400 turboprop fleet on routes to Chittagong, Sylhet, Cox's Bazar, Jessore, Saidpur, Rajshahi, and Barishal. These are 1-hour sectors with tight margins and a strong social mandate. The new order contains no replacement turboprops and no domestic capacity addition. The Dash-8 Q400 fleet, averaging 15 to 20 years of age by the time the new Boeing aircraft arrive, will need replacement during the same window. None of that capital expenditure is provided for in the announced order.
The aggregate corridor analysis points in one direction. Biman's revenue-strongest corridor (Middle East) receives zero new widebody capacity and barely any narrowbody growth. Its growth corridor (South and Southeast Asia) receives no new narrowbodies. Its slot-constrained corridor (Europe) receives widebody capacity it cannot fully deploy. Its regulatory-blocked corridor (North America) receives the bulk of the order on aircraft optimised for routes Biman cannot legally operate today. Its social-mandate corridor (domestic) receives nothing.
A capacity addition of 50 to 70 percent of current system ASK, weighted toward routes the carrier does not fly and routes the carrier cannot fly, on top of an operational base where roughly four of every ten widebodies have been seen grounded in a single mid-2025 snapshot, is not a fleet plan. It is a procurement that did not survive contact with route economics.
The break-even load factor implication is severe in central scenarios. The standard formula is BELF = CASM / RASM, where any flight needs that share of available seats filled to cover unit cost. Public 787-family CASM is not disclosed at airframe-level by airlines; United and Air Canada describe the 787-10 as "lowest seat-mile cost" in their fleets, with system-wide widebody CASM in the range of 8 to 10 cents per ASM ex-fuel (US carrier 10-Q filings, mba Aviation cost migration analysis 2023-2024). Add fuel and total CASM lands in the 10 to 13 cents per ASM range for widebody operations. Biman's system RASM (above) is approximately 5 to 6 cents per ASM at the relevant exchange rate.
These two numbers do not have to be perfectly precise to make the analytical point: at Biman's current revenue per ASM and an industry-typical 787-10 CASM, break-even load factor on long-haul service sits in the 75 to 90 percent range. Biman's current system load factor is 82 percent. The new widebodies have no margin to disappoint, and they are being added on routes where Biman's load factor history is mixed (Middle East suspensions, Manchester suspension, Toronto via one stop) or non-existent (direct US, Australia, Tokyo). For comparison, full-service Asian flag carriers like Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific operate in the 78 to 84 percent load factor range across their long-haul widebody fleets. Biman would need to match those carriers' load factors on routes those carriers do not even fly, on aircraft that arrive in 2031, in markets where competing Gulf carriers are already entrenched.
5. The aircraft Biman cannot fly today
Adding 14 aircraft to a fleet that cannot fully operate the 21 it already owns is its own form of arithmetic. The current state of Biman's fleet, on operational metrics that matter, is not a base from which a 67 percent fleet expansion makes sense.
Aircraft on ground. A point-in-time snapshot from mid-2025 reported in bdnews24 and The Daily Star documented four of Biman's ten widebody aircraft grounded simultaneously, including three Boeing 787 Dreamliners and one Boeing 777-300ER, a 40 percent aircraft-on-ground rate on that day. AOG rates fluctuate week to week with maintenance schedules, parts availability, and Hajj-cycle effects, and a single snapshot does not establish an annualised rate. Industry norms for widebody fleets sit between 5 and 10 percent at any given time. Biman does not publish a multi-month AOG time series, so the structural rate cannot be determined from public data. The conservative reading is that a snapshot at four times the industry-norm ceiling, even if not a year-round average, places Biman well outside the operational distribution observed at peer flag carriers. This piece treats the 40 percent figure as a single observed snapshot, not a structural rate, throughout.
Technical incidents. The Business Standard documented at least 35 technical glitches disrupting Biman flights in a 2.5-month window in 2025. bdnews24 reported 10 separate incidents in a six-week period, including engine, landing-gear, and pressurisation faults. The Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh has, on multiple occasions, issued safety concerns about the airline's engineering oversight.
Maintenance overstretch. Biman's engineering staff are described in industry reporting as "overburdened and fatigued," with critical Boeing parts shortages slowing scheduled maintenance and aircraft flying high utilisation against deferred inspection schedules. This is the operational profile of an airline running close to a hard stop.
Pilot capability. In 2024, Biman recruited 14 contractual pilots to fly the Boeing 777-300ER, citing an immediate shortage. Per The Daily Star, only five of the 14 (four captains and one first officer) passed the type-certification tests required to fly the aircraft. To be clear: the certification gate worked, in that nine candidates were filtered out before flying. The Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh classified the recruitment process itself as a "safety concern" because the upstream selection pushed nine unsuitable candidates into the certification pipeline at a moment of declared pilot shortage. A 36 percent pass rate on emergency hires is not, on its own, a safety failure; it is a recruitment-funnel failure that happened at the same moment the airline was claiming acute capacity need. The combination is the concern.
Daily utilisation. Boeing publishes that the average 787 across the global fleet flies more than 12 hours per day. Aviation Week's widebody utilisation data places the average at 13.0 daily block hours with 1.5 daily departures. Best-in-class operators (Air Canada, ANA) approach 18 hours over an eight-day cycle. Biman does not publish per-frame utilisation in its public statements. Inferring from the mid-2025 grounding snapshot, 35 technical glitches in 75 days, and the published operating profit of Tk 1,602 crore across the full fleet, Biman's operational widebody utilisation is materially below the industry norm, though the precise figure is not in the public record.
The implication is direct enough without a precise estimate. An aircraft acquired at or near list price and flown at meaningfully below industry-standard utilisation produces, on a per-block-hour basis, higher unit cost than the same aircraft in a competently run fleet. Biman is not paying market price for aircraft and then operating them at market efficiency. It is paying near-list price and operating below market efficiency. The cost gap compounds, and the precise magnitude depends on operating data Biman has not chosen to publish.
6. The corruption matrix
The case for adding $3.7 billion of new aircraft to a state-owned carrier's balance sheet depends, at minimum, on the operating institution being able to convert the asset to revenue without leakage. The publicly available record on Biman, drawn from Bangladeshi business journalism and Anti-Corruption Commission filings, makes this assumption hard to sustain.
The ticket syndicate. Bangladesh Post and Daily Messenger reported that an organised group of Biman officials extracted Tk 20 to 25 lakh per day from intending passengers over a four-year period through ticket-blocking and parallel-channel sales. That is Tk 73 to 91 crore per year in revenue diverted from the carrier's books, and over the documented four-year window, Tk 290 to 365 crore in cumulative leakage. The ACC named three officials in 2024 reporting and listed ten officials whose passports were sought for seizure.
The cargo cartel. An internal Biman audit reported in The Daily Star and The Business Standard identified Tk 360 crore (Tk 3.6 billion) looted from the cargo division of Hazrat Shah Jalal International Airport over a ten-year period. The airline's cargo handling has been described in bdmilitary reporting as a "flying cargo cartel," with 756 kilograms of gold discovered on Biman flights between 2013 and 2015 alone.
The accounting. Dhaka Tribune and Prothom Alo have separately reported that Biman conceals information to show profits, and that the FY 2024-25 profit figure of Tk 785 crore is questioned on its accounting basis. The ACC and successive civil aviation ministers have publicly stated that Biman cannot continue as a "law unto itself."
The amnesty. The Business Standard reported in 2024 that "Biman top men were into graft, new MD pardoned them all." The administrative response to documented corruption has, on the record, been forgiveness rather than prosecution.
These four categories should not be summed into a single "corruption" headline because they measure different things. Revenue diverted from Biman's books (ticket syndicate, audit-flagged cargo loot) is the cleanest measure of operational leakage and totals on the order of Tk 650 to 725 crore over the last decade, by the figures that have surfaced. Smuggling intercepted on Biman flights (the gold cases) is a different matter: that value never accrued to Biman, and the airline's role is institutional facilitation rather than direct theft, though it speaks to an operational environment in which contraband moved through the carrier in volume. State-body arrears (Tk 8,100 crore to CAA and BPC) are unrecorded transfers within the state, not leakage to private hands; they overstate true operating losses but understate the implicit subsidy the airline has been receiving by not paying its bills. Accounting opacity is a fourth category, which the Dhaka Tribune and Prothom Alo reporting flags but does not quantify.
These four categories together do not produce a single "Biman loses X crore per year" figure. They do produce a consistent picture: operational leakage in the multi-hundred-crore range per decade on revenue, an off-balance-sheet liability stack roughly an order of magnitude larger, and an audit and disclosure environment that has not been adequate to either stop or measure the leakage. Layering a 20-year sovereign-guaranteed contract on top of this institutional profile is not a recapitalisation. It is an enlargement of the surface area through which losses can be transferred to the state.
7. Routes that did not survive
Biman's recent route history is the empirical answer to whether the airline can absorb 10 new widebodies optimised for long-haul. The answer, on the carrier's own track record, is that it cannot.
Manchester was suspended in March 2026 over what Biman described as operational constraints, with a planned restart in July 2026 as a twice-weekly Sylhet routing. The route had already been at the centre of a controversy in early 2026 over a "blocked Manchester-Sylhet" service, with operational and political disputes interleaved.
New York has been suspended since 2006. Biman has, since 2023, repeatedly stated an intention to restart the route. It has not done so. The Federal Aviation Administration's prior placement of Bangladesh's CAA into Category 2 status, combined with FAA fines on Biman for rule breaches, materially complicate any New York restart. There is no evidence Biman has either the regulatory clearance or the operational capability to fly the route, and the 787-10s now ordered cannot reach New York direct in any case.
Rome had been off the network for 15 years before resumption in March 2024. The current Rome operation is a technical stop on the Toronto routing, not a standalone destination.
Six Middle East routes were suspended in 2024 over what The Business Standard described as loss-making economics. The Middle East is, structurally, Biman's strongest revenue corridor, given Bangladeshi expatriate worker volumes. An airline that cannot operate its strongest corridor at sustained profitability is not an airline that should be adding eight 787-10s.
The pattern is consistent: Biman opens routes, struggles to sustain them, suspends them, and announces resumptions that do not materialise. The new 787-10 fleet is being ordered to fly routes the airline has not yet demonstrated it can operate.
8. The carrier was not the buyer
Bangladesh's commerce ministry placed the original order for 25 aircraft in mid-2025 as part of the trade negotiation. According to bdnews24 reporting and statements from former Biman board members, the airline itself was not consulted. Aircraft procurement decisions in any normally functioning flag carrier flow through a fleet planning committee, a technical and financial assessment, and board approval. None of those gates were used. Biman was informed that it would be operating the aircraft after the political commitment had already been made.
This matters for two reasons. First, the people who will fly, maintain, and account for these aircraft were excluded from the decision about which aircraft to buy and how many. The mismatch between the order's widebody-heavy composition and Biman's actual route economics is a direct consequence of that exclusion. Aviation procurement done well is iterative, with airline operations, finance, and technical departments each shaping the order. Aviation procurement done as a tariff trade is a list of frames bolted onto a diplomatic communique.
Second, the Biman CEO has publicly defended the deal as based on "operational and commercial grounds following detailed assessments of fleet compatibility, maintenance support, financing options, delivery schedules and long-term operational efficiency." The chronology contradicts this. The order was placed by the commerce ministry. The technical justification was assembled afterward to fit the political decision. This sequence is not unusual in state-owned enterprise procurement, but it is the opposite of what defenders of the deal claim.
9. The bill, with interest
The financing structure makes the deal more expensive than the headline figure suggests. The government will issue a sovereign guarantee underwriting Biman's payments to Boeing, meaning the Bangladesh state will service the debt if the airline cannot. Reporting in The Week and bdnews24 puts annual debt service at Tk 1,500 to 2,000 crore over an approximately 20-year repayment window.
That works out to a total debt service of Tk 30,000 to 40,000 crore in nominal terms over the life of the agreement. Interest, fees, and currency depreciation are the variables that determine where in, or above, that band the total lands; the financing terms and the Taka-Dollar path that would pin the figure down have not been disclosed.
The annual cost can be benchmarked directly against Biman's own profit and loss. Biman's record net profit in FY 2024-25 was Tk 785 crore. The annual debt service on the new Boeing contract, at Tk 1,500 to 2,000 crore, will exceed Biman's record annual net profit by a factor of roughly two.
The relevant base case is also worse than this single figure suggests, because Biman is already servicing prior Boeing debt. Reporting in bdnews24 and The Business Standard documents that the airline repaid approximately Tk 1,274 crore in FY 2023-24 alone on the loans for its existing Boeing fleet, with cumulative principal-and-interest repayments through November 2024 reaching approximately $1.04 billion. The new contract therefore does not initiate Biman's exposure to Boeing debt service. It approximately doubles it, layering Tk 1,500 to 2,000 crore on top of the Tk 1,274 crore the airline is already paying.
The arithmetic is unambiguous: the airline cannot service this debt from operating cash flow at its current scale of business. The sovereign guarantee is not a backstop for an unlikely tail risk. It is the primary repayment mechanism in any credible base-case projection.
This also lands on a balance sheet that already carries substantial off-balance-sheet liabilities to other arms of the state. Biman owes approximately Tk 6,300 crore to the Civil Aviation Authority and Tk 1,800 crore to the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation for fuel, with state-body arrears totalling more than Tk 8,100 crore before the Boeing contract. The "record profit" of FY 2024-25 has been challenged in the Bangladeshi business press on the grounds that it reflects accounting choices rather than improved operating economics. Stacking a 20-year sovereign-guaranteed obligation on top of an unresolved arrears stack, an institution with documented multi-hundred-crore corruption leaks, and a route network that has lost more than it has gained, is not fleet renewal. It is a deferred fiscal transfer.
10. The opportunity cost
The Boeing contract's annual cash exposure to the Bangladesh treasury, via the sovereign guarantee, is approximately Tk 1,500 to 2,000 crore in debt service over a 20-year window. The honest comparison is flow against flow.
The FY 2025-26 national budget allocated Tk 41,908 crore to the health and family welfare sector (Ministry of Finance budget documents; reported by The Business Standard, BSS, Daily Sun). The Boeing contract's annual debt service is therefore roughly 3.6 to 4.8 percent of annual health spending, sustained over twenty years. Cumulatively, the debt service of Tk 30,000 to 40,000 crore runs to about 3 to 5 percent of an undiscounted 20-year health envelope at constant FY26 spending.
This is the analytically correct framing, and it cuts in two directions that the public debate has tended to merge. On the stock of the obligation, the principal value of $3.7 billion is 88 percent of one year's health budget at the official Tk 100/USD rate (Tk 37,000 crore against Tk 41,908 crore), but 108 percent at the market Tk 122/USD rate (Tk 45,140 crore). At the rate the treasury will actually pay dollars, the contract exceeds a full year of national health spending. The popular "almost a year of health spending" framing is, if anything, conservative once the market rate is used. On the flow of the obligation, the comparison is gentler: the contract is a structured 20-year liability, not a one-time cash diversion, and the alternative was never Tk 37,000 crore of cash to spend on clinics. The honest claim holds both ends at once. The stock exceeds a year of health spending at market rate; the annual flow is a 4-percent diversion from the health envelope sustained for two decades. Neither framing is rhetorical excess. Each is a real and consequential cost, and they describe different things.
The same fiscal envelope is being asked to absorb, in parallel: a 15-year LNG import commitment of approximately $15 billion to the United States, an annual agricultural import commitment of approximately $3.5 billion in US wheat, soybean oil, palm olein, and cotton, and the Boeing aircraft programme. Summed over their stated horizons, the trade-package liabilities exceed $50 billion in nominal terms. They were entered into to reduce a tariff threat on a US-bound export base of approximately $8.4 billion (2024), of which ready-made garments contribute approximately $7.3 billion (US Census Bureau / US Commerce Department OTEXA 2024 trade data).
The fiscal arithmetic of the trade package as a whole, of which the Boeing deal is the most visible component, is that Bangladesh has accepted multi-decade liabilities in exchange for tariff relief that is itself reversible at any US administration change. The relief is real. The exports affected are real. The duration mismatch between the liability and the contingent benefit is severe, and the Boeing contract is the line item where it shows up most clearly.
11. Economic simulation: what the deal costs under disclosed scenarios
The headline figures of $3.7 billion principal and Tk 1,500 to 2,000 crore annual debt service are point estimates. The actual cost to the Bangladesh treasury depends on three variables that are not yet known and will not be settled until delivery and financing terms are published: the path of the Bangladesh Taka against the US dollar, the discount rate appropriate to a 20-year sovereign liability, and Biman's operating cash flow over the repayment window.
The exercise below holds the contract's structure constant and varies the Taka path. All three scenarios use the same midpoint annual payment of approximately USD 143 million (Tk 1,750 crore at the April 2026 reference rate of Tk 122/USD), the same 20-year amortisation, and the same 7 percent discount rate, which sits within the recent yield range on Bangladesh's 10-year government securities. The only variable is annual Taka depreciation against the dollar.
| Scenario | Taka depreciation | Cumulative NPV (Tk crore) | Cumulative NPV ($M) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moderate | 3% / yr | ~Tk 24,500 cr | ~$2.0B |
| Long-run avg | 5% / yr | ~Tk 28,400 cr | ~$2.3B |
| Stress | 7% / yr | ~Tk 33,000 cr | ~$2.7B |
The scenarios produce a present-value range of approximately Tk 24,500 to 33,000 crore, or roughly $2.0 to 2.7 billion in today's money. The undiscounted nominal cash outflow over 20 years is materially larger and depends on the same Taka path. Bangladesh's recent currency history bounds the relevant range. The Taka depreciated from approximately Tk 86 to Tk 122 per US dollar between mid-2022 and early 2024, an average annual rate well above 10 percent during the acute phase, before stabilising in 2024-2025. A 5 percent annual depreciation over the 20-year window is, on the post-stabilisation trend, a plausible base case rather than a stress.
The counterfactual is the second, and sharper, half of the exercise: if the same fiscal capacity were available for alternative public investment, what would it buy? The opportunity cost is best read against three social systems Bangladesh underfunds.
In primary healthcare, the system reaches roughly 170 million people through approximately 18,000 community clinics, upazila health complexes, and union sub-centres, with recurrent operating cost per clinic-year on the order of Tk 50 to 70 lakh. The Boeing contract value, deployed at Tk 60 lakh per clinic-year on average, would fund the entire primary healthcare delivery system for approximately six years.
In education, the FY 2025-26 Annual Development Programme allocation for the sector is approximately Tk 25,000 crore. The Boeing contract value of Tk 37,000 crore (official rate) exceeds one and a half years of the entire education sector ADP, an envelope that includes secondary school stipends, primary teacher recruitment, and tertiary infrastructure.
In nutrition, the per-child cost of community-based management of acute malnutrition (CMAM), the standard intervention for severe wasting, is on the order of $200 to $300 per case. Bangladesh has roughly 2.0 to 2.5 million children under five with stunting or wasting at any given time, concentrated in Sylhet, Mymensingh, and Barishal. The Boeing contract value, deployed at $250 per case, could fund CMAM for the entire affected cohort, with substantial budget remaining for micronutrient supplementation and prevention.
These counterfactuals are not arguments that Bangladesh should never invest in aviation. They calibrate what is being foregone. A $3.7 billion 20-year sovereign-guaranteed obligation, made under tariff coercion, on terms that did not pass through the airline's own fleet planning process, is paid out of the same envelope that funds the system serving the country's poorest divisions.
A third sensitivity matters for the deal's net economic effect: the value of the tariff relief itself, which is the strongest defence of the deal. The threatened 37 percent tariff would have applied to a US-bound export base of approximately $8.4 billion (2024), of which ready-made garments contribute approximately $7.3 billion (US Commerce Department OTEXA 2024). A static calculation says the 17-percentage-point reduction (from 37 to 20 percent) is worth approximately $1.4 billion per year in foregone duty, and the marginal one-point reduction in the February 2026 agreement adds roughly $80 million per year more.
That static figure is an upper bound, because it holds export volume fixed at its pre-tariff level. Under a 37 percent tariff, export volume would contract, so the duty actually averted is lower than the static number, and only a fraction of the relief is captured by Bangladeshi exporters rather than US buyers. By how much depends on the price elasticity of US demand for Bangladeshi apparel and on the pass-through share, neither of which is settled in the literature for this specific market. This analysis does not assign a single point estimate to the exporter-captured value, because doing so would require choosing an elasticity and a pass-through rate that cannot be verified for Bangladesh RMG against the US in 2026; a precise dollar output would be false precision. The defensible directional claim is the one that survives any reasonable parameter choice: the annual value of the tariff relief captured by Bangladesh exceeds the Boeing contract's roughly $143 million annual debt service, on a flow basis, in central scenarios. The defence is genuine, and it is smaller than the static numbers suggest.
The defence weakens, however, when the Pakistan and Sri Lanka counterfactuals are introduced. Both countries achieved equal or better tariff outcomes without any aircraft commitment. If even half of Bangladesh's tariff reduction would have been available without the Boeing contract, the cost-benefit calculation tightens substantially. And the Boeing contract is a hard, sovereign-guaranteed liability, while the tariff relief is a US executive policy that could be reversed at any time. The relief is contingent. The debt is not.
12. Counterarguments and second-order considerations
A serious analysis must engage with the strongest defences of the deal. There are seven worth taking on directly.
Fleet aging and slot scarcity. Biman's four 737NGs are approaching retirement, the 777-300ERs will need successors by the early 2030s, and Boeing and Airbus widebody slots in 2031-2035 are scarce because of post-pandemic backlog. Locking in slots now is operationally rational. This is true on the facts. It does not justify the order's actual composition. A replacement-driven order would have been narrowbody-heavy, not widebody-heavy, and would have included Dash-8 successors for the domestic fleet. The slot argument is real; the slot allocation in this contract is wrong.
Tariff relief economics. On a flow basis, the duty relief captured by Bangladeshi exporters exceeds the Boeing contract's $143 million annual debt service in central scenarios, as §11 sets out. The arithmetic is favourable only if the counterfactual is a 37 percent tariff with no negotiation. Pakistan secured 19 percent in exchange for resource-access commitments, not zero, and Sri Lanka secured 20 percent with no aircraft order. The relevant comparison is not "Pakistan paid nothing" but "Pakistan paid in a different currency, with longer extraction tails and more optionality, for the same broad outcome." The Boeing contract is a hard 20-year sovereign-guaranteed cash liability. The tariff relief is a US executive policy reversible at any administration change. Hard, denominated liabilities should not be exchanged for contingent benefits without testing whether an in-kind alternative would have produced the same tariff outcome at lower committed cost.
Single-OEM standardisation. Biman's existing fleet is 76 percent Boeing by aircraft count. Moving to 100 percent Boeing simplifies parts, training, and engineering by a low single-digit share of operating cost. This is real but small relative to the order's pricing and mix problems, and it is partially undermined by the documented engineering overstretch and grounding record on the existing Boeing fleet.
Concessional financing. US Ex-Im Bank financing, Japanese export credit, and Boeing-arranged commercial syndication can produce blended rates of 4 to 6 percent on widebody orders, 200 to 400 basis points below Bangladesh sovereign borrowing cost. On $3.7 billion over 20 years, that concession is worth a meaningful share of the contract in net present value. This is the single largest piece of potential upside in the deal. It is also entirely undisclosed in the public record. If the financing terms are concessional, the government should publish them. If they are not, the upside disappears.
Hub strategy. Hazrat Shahjalal Terminal 3, scheduled for full operation by 2027, was designed to support Biman as a regional hub capturing connecting traffic between Southeast Asia and Europe via Dhaka. A larger 787-10 fleet is consistent with a hub strategy. The argument is structurally sound. The execution evidence is not yet available. A hub requires reliable schedules, on-time performance above 90 percent, customs and immigration throughput, ground handling capacity, and a partner network. Biman currently delivers about 80 percent on-time performance, has shown a 40 percent widebody grounding snapshot, and operates no codeshare alliance. Ordering hub aircraft is the easy part of a hub strategy.
Diaspora demand. Bangladeshi diaspora populations in North America (approximately 800,000, of whom roughly 700,000 in the US and 100,000 in Canada, per Bangladesh High Commission estimates), Europe (approximately 850,000, of whom 600,000 in the United Kingdom), and Australia (approximately 100,000) total approximately 1.75 million, with structural visiting-friends-and-relatives demand. The 787-10 fleet would, in principle, allow Biman to compete on direct service against the Gulf-hub one-stop product, except on the longest routes the 787-10 cannot fly. This is a real demand base. But there is no published Biman five-year plan that lays out which routes the new aircraft will fly, at what frequencies, with what yield assumptions, and what break-even load factor at those yields. Without this analysis, the demand defence is a hope, not a plan.
Political economy of inheritance. The new government, sworn in February 2026, inherited the Boeing commitment from the caretaker administration. Walking away would have been read internationally as default, with consequences for credit ratings, trade negotiations, and political capital. The 25-to-14 reduction did save a substantial headline commitment. The defence is partly correct. The question is whether further reduction was available. Pakistan's outcome (zero aircraft for an equivalent tariff result) suggests it was. The new government did not test the floor.
The aggregate of these counterarguments narrows the case but does not flip it. The deal remains net negative under central scenarios: the financing concession, if real and disclosed, is the one factor that could materially improve the verdict, and it has not been disclosed. The gap between cost and benefit could plausibly have been closed by a more competently structured contract. It was not closed by this one.
13. Geopolitics, corruption, mismanagement: which one is it?
The framing that has dominated Bangladeshi commentary on the deal asks whether this is a geopolitical surrender, a corruption opportunity, or simple operational mismanagement. The honest answer is that it is all three, in a specific and interlocking way.
Geopolitical coercion is the entry point. The deal began as a tariff hostage situation. The Trump administration extracted aircraft commitments from several Asian economies on similar logic. Bangladesh, with its export dependence on the US RMG market and limited diplomatic leverage, was a price-taker. This is the explanation for why a deal exists at all.
Mismanagement is what shaped its terms. A competently negotiated deal would have studied the Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka outcomes in real time and tested the floor of US demand. It would have routed the order through Biman's fleet planning process, not announced 25 aircraft from the commerce ministry. It would have published a net price, not a list-price headline. It would have weighted narrowbody-heavy, not widebody-heavy. The deal's structure reflects an absence of these basic procurement disciplines, not a different judgement about the underlying tradeoff. This is the explanation for why the deal looks the way it does.
Corruption is what creates the downside risk. Biman is, by any documentary standard, a leaky institution. Tk 360 crore in cargo theft over a decade. Tk 73 to 91 crore per year in ticket-syndicate diversion. 756 kilograms of gold trafficked through the cargo system in a 2.5-year window. A pilot recruitment process that passes 36 percent of candidates and is classified as a safety concern by the regulator. Pardons issued to documented offenders. The new aircraft are not arriving into a clean operating environment. They are arriving into one in which a meaningful fraction of revenue is, on the public record, captured by parallel channels rather than the carrier's books. The sovereign guarantee underwrites the debt service. It does not underwrite the institutional capacity to convert the asset to net cash flow. This is the explanation for why the downside is asymmetric.
Bangladesh did not buy aircraft. It bought tariff relief, paid in aircraft, on terms it did not negotiate to floor, to be operated by an institution that loses material revenue to corruption, fails to sustain the routes it opens, was seen with 40 percent of its widebodies grounded in a mid-2025 snapshot, recruits pilots who fail certification, and reports profits its own business press considers concealed. Each of these failures is documented in Bangladeshi journalism. The decision to enlarge this institution by 67 percent, on a sovereign guarantee, is the policy choice this analysis disputes.
14. What a competent deal would have looked like
A defensible procurement, on the same political constraint of needing to make a Boeing commitment to secure tariff relief, would have looked materially different on six dimensions. Each is owner-assigned and carries a measurable success signal.
Order composition and size (owner: Biman fleet planning committee). Narrowbody-heavy and smaller: roughly six 737-8 MAX to replace the existing 737NGs and add modest growth, plus two to four 787-9s to renew widebody capacity on long-haul routes Biman actually flies, with no 787-10s. Total order size of eight to ten aircraft, not fourteen. Success signal: sovereign-guarantee exposure cut by roughly 30 percent against the announced contract, with every frame mapped to a route Biman currently flies or can legally fly.
Pricing transparency (owner: Ministry of Finance). A published net contract value with the gross-to-net discount disclosed. A procurement bounded by a political precommitment to Boeing should still have produced a discount in the 30 to 50 percent range. Success signal: a net price tabled before parliament, with any shortfall against that range justified in writing.
Conditionality (owner: cabinet, on the commerce ministry's recommendation). Delivery acceptance tied to Bangladesh-side milestones: completion of Hazrat Shahjalal Terminal 3, specific traffic targets on new routes, Biman operating-margin thresholds, and ACC clearance of named corruption cases. Success signal: a delivery schedule with acceptance gates, not an unconditional take-or-pay obligation.
Governance (owner: Biman board and the Civil Aviation Authority). The order routed through fleet planning, board, and regulator before the commerce ministry signs any commitment. The reverse sequence, which is what happened, locks in technical mistakes the airline then has to retrofit a justification for. Success signal: a board minute approving the fleet plan dated before the diplomatic commitment.
Fiscal disclosure (owner: Ministry of Finance). Publication of the sovereign guarantee's expected-loss profile, the financing terms, the currency-hedging provisions, and the projected net cost to the treasury under three Taka-Dollar scenarios. Success signal: a published fiscal-risk statement attached to the budget.
Floor-testing (owner: the trade negotiation team). A documented attempt to secure the tariff outcome with a smaller or in-kind commitment, given that Pakistan and Sri Lanka reached the same range with no aircraft order at all. Success signal: a negotiation record showing the smaller offer was tabled and the US response logged.
These are not exotic asks. They are the standard governance steps for a $3.7 billion sovereign-guaranteed procurement in any country with a functional public-finance review process.
What this is, and what it is not
The Biman-Boeing contract signed on April 30, 2026 is not an aviation strategy. It is a tariff payment, denominated in aircraft, financed by a sovereign guarantee, amortised over 20 years, and operated by an institution that the Anti-Corruption Commission, the Civil Aviation Authority, and the Bangladeshi business press have separately documented as structurally incapable of converting the asset to clean cash flow.
The aviation logic was bolted on after the political decision. The pricing appears to reflect zero negotiating leverage. The fleet composition does not match the route network. Peer countries achieved equal or better tariff outcomes for less, or for nothing. The carrier that will operate the aircraft was not consulted. A mid-2025 snapshot showed 40 percent of Biman's widebodies grounded at once. The fiscal exposure exceeds the airline's record annual net profit by a factor of roughly two. The headline contract value equals 88 percent of one year's national health spending at the official Tk 100/USD rate, and 108 percent, more than a full year, at the market Tk 122/USD rate the treasury will actually pay (Tk 37,000 to 45,140 crore against the FY2025-26 health allocation of Tk 41,908 crore). The corruption record, by the airline's own internal audits, runs into multiple hundreds of crores per decade.
None of this means Bangladesh should never buy Boeing aircraft. It means this contract, on these terms, with this disclosure, by this institution, is a bad trade. The cost of buying tariff relief in the form of long-dated capital goods, on schedules and prices the buyer cannot influence, paid through an operator with documented leakage, is paid by the same treasury that funds hospitals, schools, and the social safety net for the poorest divisions. The cost will be paid in 2030, and 2035, and 2045, by people who were not present when the trade was made.
Better deals are possible. They require treating aviation procurement as procurement, treating trade negotiation as negotiation, treating sovereign guarantees as commitments that have to be earned, and treating state-owned operators as institutions that have to demonstrate operational and ethical capacity before they are scaled. None of these conditions held for this contract.
Sources
- Boeing aircraft pricing context: Boeing has not published official list prices since 2018 (last published 787-10 at $338M, 787-9 at $292M, 737-8 MAX at approximately $122M). Industry discount norms of 35 to 55 percent on widebody orders reported across aviation finance coverage (Leeham News, ch-aviation, IBA Group fleet valuation studies). Recent transaction comparables: Vietnam Airlines 2026 (50 × 737-8 MAX, $7.8 to 8.1B, $156 to 162M per aircraft); Air India 2023 (220 Boeing aircraft, $34B, $155M average); Indonesia 2025 (50 mixed Boeing, $13.5B, $270M per aircraft). Reported by Reuters, Bloomberg, ch-aviation, Boeing media room.
- Boeing 787 range specifications: 787-10 published maximum range approximately 6,330 to 6,430 nautical miles (11,723 to 11,910 km); 787-9 published maximum range 7,565 nautical miles (14,010 km). Boeing 787 published specifications, corroborated by Singapore Airlines fleet pages and AXON Aviation aircraft data. Dhaka-New York (JFK) great-circle distance approximately 12,681 km; Dhaka-Los Angeles approximately 12,440 km (Air Miles Calculator, distance.to).
- Biman financial and fleet data, FY 2024-25: net profit Tk 785.21 crore, revenue Tk 11,559 crore, cabin factor 82 percent, fleet of 21 aircraft, 3.4 million passengers, 43,918 tonnes cargo. State-body arrears of approximately Tk 8,100 crore (Tk 6,300 crore to CAA, Tk 1,800 crore to BPC). Reported by The Daily Star, The Business Standard, Prothom Alo, bdnews24, BSS.
- Deal origin and tariff context: caretaker government commitment of August 2025, original 25-aircraft order, US reciprocal tariff reduced from 37 percent threat to 20 percent over a 15 percent baseline (effective approximately 35 percent), trimmed to 19 percent in February 2026. Reported by Bloomberg, AeroTime, The Daily Star, The Business Standard, Eastern Eye, Dhaka Tribune, The Tribune.
- Final contract terms, April 30, 2026: 14 aircraft (eight 787-10, two 787-9, four 737-8 MAX), first delivery October 2031, last delivery November 2035, contract value approximately $3.7 billion. Reported by Free Malaysia Today, The Daily Star, The Financial Express, BSS, Aviation A2Z.
- Peer Boeing-for-tariff deals: Indonesia (50 aircraft, $13.5B, 19 percent tariff), Vietnam (90+ aircraft across three carriers, $30B+, 20 percent tariff), Pakistan (19 percent tariff, no aircraft commitment, oil and minerals access offered), Sri Lanka (20 percent tariff, no aircraft commitment). Reported by CNBC, Bloomberg, ch-aviation, AeroTime, Yahoo Finance, Aerospace Global News, Dawn, NBC News, Arab News, Al Jazeera, Asia Times. No party has published a net present value for the Pakistan package; this analysis does not estimate one.
- Sovereign guarantee, debt service, and procurement governance: estimated annual debt service Tk 1,500 to 2,000 crore over 20 years; existing Boeing-fleet repayment of approximately Tk 1,274 crore in FY 2023-24 and cumulative principal-and-interest of approximately $1.04 billion through November 2024; Biman not consulted on commerce-ministry order. Reported by The Week, bdnews24, The Business Standard. Editorial framing in The Daily Star ("Boeing deal reflects geopolitics more than aviation strategy"), critical opinion in Eurasia Review ("The Price of Obedience"), Bangladesh Pratidin.
- Biman corruption record: ticket syndicate extracting Tk 20 to 25 lakh per day (Bangladesh Post, Daily Messenger, ACC filings); Tk 360 crore cargo loot over ten years (The Daily Star, The Business Standard internal audit reporting); 756 kg gold trafficked on Biman flights 2013-2015 (bdmilitary, New Age); concealed profits (Dhaka Tribune, Prothom Alo); senior management amnesty (The Business Standard); Anti-Corruption Commission listing of ten officials for passport seizure.
- Biman operational state: four of ten widebodies grounded in a single mid-2025 snapshot, 35 technical glitches in 2.5 months, 10 incidents in 6 weeks, engineering overstretch, parts shortages (The Business Standard, bdnews24, The Daily Star, bdmilitary). Pilot recruitment: 5 of 14 contractual pilots passed certification, CAA classified the recruitment process as a "safety concern" (The Daily Star).
- Route record: Manchester suspension March 2026 (Aerospace Global News, bdnews24); New York suspended since 2006, FAA Category 2 history (bdnews24); Rome 15-year gap then resumption March 2024 (bdnews24); six Middle East routes suspended over loss-making economics (The Business Standard).
- Industry utilisation benchmarks: Boeing 787 average 12+ hours/day fleetwide, widebody industry average 13.0 daily block hours, 1.5 daily departures (Boeing media room, Aviation Week, Aerodata).
- Trade-package liabilities: 15-year LNG commitment of approximately $15 billion, annual US agricultural imports of approximately $3.5 billion (wheat, soybean oil, palm olein, cotton). Reported by bdnews24, Dhaka Tribune, US trade press.
- US-bound exports: total Bangladesh exports to the US approximately $8.4 billion (2024), of which ready-made garments approximately $7.3 billion (US Commerce Department OTEXA / US Census Bureau 2024 trade data; The Business Standard).
- FY 2025-26 health budget allocation Tk 41,908 crore (Ministry of Finance budget documents; The Business Standard, BSS, Daily Sun, Dhaka Tribune). Education sector ADP allocation approximately Tk 25,000 crore.