Wizz Air confirms Airbus deliveries until end of 2025

By Karol Badohal

WARSAW (Reuters) - Wizz Air has confirmation of its Airbus deliveries until the end of 2025, the airline's chief executive said on Tuesday, despite questions over whether the European planemaker can meet its full-year delivery target.

As plane manufacturers have struggled to keep pace with demand because of supply chain and technical issues, Airbus deliveries fell 9% in September to 50 jets compared with a year ago.

"Right now, as we speak, we are reconfirmed with Airbus till the end of 2025," Wizz Air Chief Executive Jozsef Varadi told a news conference in Warsaw.

"I'm pretty confident that... (until) the end of 2025 we are fine and we understand the delivery profile. We are fine in 2026 and beyond too, but we just need to understand how many aircraft we are going to be able to take."

Varadi said Airbus faced challenges with the delivery of engines from Pratt & Whitney, as well as other parts and with its own capacity.

"As we have previously said, Airbus is facing some persistent and specific supply chain issues," the company said in an emailed response to Reuters questions. "We are working together with suppliers to mitigate the impact of the current situation on our customers."

Neither Pratt & Whitney nor its owner RTX immediately responded to request for comment.

Varadi also said he believed inflationary pressures, which have led to fare increases, were easing.

"If I look at the environment today, I mean you are seeing fuel coming down, inflation coming down, interest rates coming down, so it seems to me that after a kind of a spike of pressure on costs, now it is a time of easing that pressure," he said.

"Hopefully the worst is already behind us."

He said he could not say however when flights to Israel could resume but if they did not before the high demand Christmas period, the airline would seek an alternative source of income.

"We will have to take a decision whether the Christmas period is going to be operated to Israel or not, because if we don't operate to Israel, we want to operate somewhere else," he said.

"We are not performing any flights from any of our bases right now, today, to the region, and the region is defined to be really Tel Aviv on the one hand and Amman, Jordan on the other hand."

(Reporting by Karol Badohal, writing by Alan Charlish, Editing by Louise Heavens and Barbara Lewis)