By Jon Sindreu

If any winners emerge from the trade war started by the Trump administration, the aviation industry certainly isn't going to be among them.

Shares in aerospace manufacturers such as Boeing, Airbus, GE Aerospace and Rolls-Royce plummeted Thursday as a result of Trump's "Liberation Day" announcements. Those included 20%, 24% and 10% tariffs on goods imported from the European Union, Japan and Britain, respectively.

Currently, trans-Atlantic trade in commercial aircraft isn't subject to any tariffs. So, unless an exemption is extended to jets, American and European airlines will have to pay a lot more money for them. Their stocks also tanked Thursday.

The worst-case-scenario would be if the duties also applied to parts, because the aerospace supply chain is extremely complex. Airbus's plant in Alabama would face a cost surge, but so would Boeing's many U.S. assembly lines. The 787 Dreamliner is particularly made of foreign components, including Italian fuselages, Japanese wings and British engines.

GE Aerospace would be a particularly big loser: Its best-selling engines for the A320 and the Boeing 737 MAX are made in a 50-50 joint venture with France's Safran.

Even if the tariffs were only on finished aircraft, they would probably fail at helping a troubled Boeing catch up with Airbus. Right now, the constraint on both planemakers isn't demand for planes but the capacity to build. Production snafus have especially saddled the American company.

Boeing wouldn't even benefit from a hypothetical future in which it hoards all of the U.S. market, because lost overseas sales would roughly offset the gains. And U.S. airlines currently flying Airbus planes would hate it, as loss of fleet commonality would make them far more inefficient.

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April 03, 2025 09:55 ET (13:55 GMT)

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