Bangladesh Deepens Its Bet on Boeing With Order for 11 More Jets Amid Tariff Diplomacy

Biman Bangladesh Airlines and Boeing signed an agreement on September 23 to add 11 more jets to the national carrier's fleet, a deal finalized on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York. Boeing and Biman confirmed the order in a joint statement issued the same day, which put the order at five 787-10 Dreamliners and six 737-8 jets, coming barely five months after Biman placed what was then its largest-ever order with the American planemaker.

The signing was witnessed by a cluster of officials from both governments, an unusual level of state involvement for a commercial aircraft transaction. Rumee A. Hossain, chairman of Biman's board, signed for the airline, and Brad McMullen, Boeing's senior vice president of commercial sales and marketing, signed for the manufacturer. Bangladesh's civil aviation minister M. Rashiduzzaman Millat, state minister for foreign affairs Humaiun Kobir, Invest Bangladesh Authority chairman Chowdhury Ashik Mahmud Bin Harun and an adviser to the chief adviser, Mahdi Amin, attended, alongside US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau.

The numbers

The new order lifts Biman's combined Boeing commitments to 25 aircraft this year alone. In April, the carrier had agreed to buy 14 planes, eight 787-10s, two 787-9s and four 737-8s, in a deal Boeing valued at $3.7 billion and described as Biman's biggest purchase ever. Boeing has not disclosed a price for the September follow-on order, but Bangladesh's civil aviation and tourism adviser, Sheikh Bashir Uddin, told reporters the government expects the 11 aircraft to cost roughly 300 to 350 billion taka, with payments stretched over financing that could run as long as 20 years.

Uddin, speaking to reporters about the order, also put fresh figures on the trade backdrop driving the purchase: Bangladesh currently runs a trade deficit of about $6 billion with the United States, he said, even as the country earns more than one trillion taka a year from exports to the American market, dominated by ready-made garments. Those figures sit alongside a broader trade settlement reached in February, in which Washington agreed to cut its reciprocal tariff on Bangladeshi goods to 19 percent from a rate that had been threatened at 37 percent, while Dhaka committed to roughly $3.5 billion in purchases of American agricultural goods and an estimated $15 billion in US energy products over 15 years, plus zero-tariff treatment for apparel made with US cotton.

How Dhaka got here

The aircraft orders sit squarely inside that tariff negotiation. Bangladesh's export economy, and above all its garment sector, is heavily exposed to US demand, and the interim government led by Muhammad Yunus has spent much of the past year trying to insulate that trade from tariff escalation threatened by the Trump administration. Buying American-made jets, alongside wheat, cotton and energy, has become one of the more visible ways Dhaka can show it is narrowing the imbalance without directly touching tariff schedules on garments.

Biman's own fleet math reinforces the logic. The airline currently flies a mixed fleet of around 19 aircraft, a combination of 787s, 777s and 737 Next-Generation jets, some of them aging. The April order, signed by Biman's managing director Kaizer Sohail Ahmed and Boeing's Paul Righi, was framed as a long-overdue fleet renewal with deliveries scheduled between 2031 and 2035. Wednesday's supplemental order extends that renewal further and adds narrowbody capacity aimed at regional routes as well as widebody capacity for long-haul service to Europe and North America.

"Today's supplemental agreement is an important step in Biman's ongoing fleet renewal and network expansion," said Rumee A. Hossain, chairman of Biman Bangladesh Airlines, in the joint announcement with Boeing.

Who is affected

For Biman, the order commits the state carrier to a fleet expansion far larger than anything in its recent history, with deliveries and financing obligations stretching into the mid-2030s. For Bangladesh's garment manufacturers and exporters, the deal is less about aviation than insurance: a tangible offering to Washington intended to keep tariff rates from climbing back toward the levels once threatened, at a time when the sector accounts for the bulk of the country's export earnings. For Boeing, the order adds to a commercial backlog the company has been rebuilding since a period of production and safety setbacks, and keeps its 787 line in North Charleston and 737 line in Renton supplied with export orders tied to trade diplomacy rather than pure fleet economics.

The deal also has a competitive dimension. Biman is weighing a separate order for 10 Airbus jets, four A350-900 widebodies and six A321neo narrowbodies, which European officials have been pressing Dhaka to complete even as the government works through a technical review. A decision to proceed with both manufacturers would push Biman's total planned acquisitions to 35 aircraft, a scale that would be transformative for an airline whose current fleet numbers barely more than half that.

Reaction

Boeing framed the order as evidence of a durable commercial relationship rather than a one-off political gesture. "Biman's follow-on order reflects its strategic approach to fleet renewal and capacity growth, and underscores the strength of our long-standing partnership," McMullen said in the companies' announcement. US Ambassador to Bangladesh Brent Christensen welcomed the signing, calling it "another win-win for the US-Bangladesh relationship," while Uddin, the aviation adviser, said Dhaka's broader aim in ongoing talks is to secure zero tariffs on garments, its principal export, rather than incremental reductions.

What happens next

Boeing has not published a delivery schedule for the 11 new aircraft, unlike the April order, whose planes are due between 2031 and 2035. Financing details, including how Biman and the Bangladeshi government will structure payments over a horizon that officials say could run two decades, have not been finalized publicly. The more immediate decision facing Dhaka is whether to proceed with the parallel Airbus order, which remains under technical review, a choice that will determine whether Biman ultimately operates a fleet built almost entirely around Boeing aircraft or a mixed one split with Europe's manufacturer. Trade negotiators on both sides are also expected to keep working toward a further reduction in the tariff Bangladesh's garment exporters pay to enter the US market, the issue that has shaped much of the commercial diplomacy behind this week's signing.