Delta Has 1,005 Mainline Jets. Its First Boeing 787s Won’t Arrive Until 2031

Delta Air Lines has 1,330 planes. That is the count in its quarterly filing for September 30, 2026: 1,005 mainline jets plus 325 regional jets flying as Delta Connection.

Not one of them is a Boeing 787. United and American both fly the Dreamliner, while Delta’s first one is not due until 2031, and that gap says a lot about how Delta builds its fleet.

How Many Planes Does Delta Have?

1,330, as of September 30, 2026. The count covers every mainline aircraft Delta operates, owned or leased, plus the regional jets that Endeavor Air, SkyWest Airlines and Republic Airways fly on its behalf.

It leaves out the 319 aircraft Delta has on firm order. A year earlier, on September 30, 2025, the same count was 1,309: 986 mainline and 323 regional.

Delta’s fleet, type by type

Delta publishes its full fleet by type in every quarterly filing, with the average age of each type. This is the table from its September 2026 filing.

The single biggest type is the Boeing 737-900ER, with 163 aircraft. Add the 737-800s and the 737 family reaches 240, just ahead of the 233 Airbus A321s and A321neos.

Count by maker and Airbus leads, with 545 mainline jets to Boeing’s 460. That Airbus lean began with the 2008 merger with Northwest Airlines, which brought Airbus jets into a fleet that had been mostly American-built.

Delta also keeps old jets flying. Its 767-300ERs average 29.7 years, its A320s 29.1 and its Boeing 757-200s 28.4, and its 74 Boeing 717s average 24.9.

The third quarter of 2026 shows how the fleet turns over. The A220-300, A321neo and A350-900 counts rose by 13 between June 30 and September 30, while the 717, 757-200 and A320 counts fell by 12, so the mainline total moved by just one.

Why the numbers differ

Search this question and you will see 1,005, a round 1,000 and 986, while Delta’s own full count is 1,330. Most of them are right about something. They are counting different things, or counting on a different date.

Mainline or the whole operation

1,005 is the mainline fleet only, and it is the number Wikipedia gives. It leaves out the 325 Delta Connection jets, which are about a quarter of everything flying with a Delta flight number.

Delta’s regional count has barely moved in a year: 323 in September 2025, 325 in every quarter of 2026. Almost all the growth is in the mainline fleet.

Owned or just painted to match

Not every Delta Connection jet belongs to Delta. Of the 325, Delta owns 202 and leases three, and the other 120 are owned or leased by SkyWest and Republic, the contractors that fly them.

Endeavor Air, a Delta subsidiary, flies 147 Bombardier CRJs. SkyWest flies 121 CRJs and E175s, and Republic flies 57 Embraer E170s and E175s.

Out of date, or counting orders

The 986 figure that still ranks is a mainline count from January 2025, and it happens to match Delta’s mainline total for September 2025 as well. Since then the mainline fleet has grown by 19 jets.

Orders are not fleet either. Add Delta’s 319 firm orders and the total would pass 1,600, but none of those jets has been delivered.

The 787 order, and where the fleet is going

On January 13, 2026, Boeing and Delta announced a firm order for 30 Boeing 787-10s, with options for 30 more. Boeing called it Delta’s first direct order for the Dreamliner, and Business Traveller noted that Delta had gone nearly two decades without ordering a Boeing widebody.

Delta had a 787 order once before, in a sense. It inherited 18 Dreamliners on order from Northwest, then canceled them in 2016 and spent the next decade buying Airbus widebodies.

The catch is timing. Deliveries of the 787-10 are scheduled to begin in 2031, so the jets that replace Delta’s oldest widebodies this decade will mostly be Airbus.

The full order book stood at 319 aircraft on September 30, 2026: 53 A220-300s, 83 A321neos, 16 A330-900s, 17 A350-900s, 20 A350-1000s, 100 Boeing 737-10s and 30 787-10s. Delta also holds options on another 126.

Expect the count to move every quarter. Delta files a new fleet table with each 10-Q, and the next one, for December 31, 2026, comes with its 2026 annual report.

How Delta compares with United and American

The three big US network airlines all publish their fleets in their annual reports, so December 31, 2025 is the cleanest like-for-like date.

At the end of 2025, American had 1,580 aircraft, United 1,490 and Delta 1,314. On mainline jets alone the gap narrows: United 1,066, American 1,013, Delta 989.

Delta’s regional fleet is the smallest of the three by a wide margin, 325 jets against 567 at American. Our breakdown of how many planes American Airlines has shows where that difference sits.

The 787 gap is starker. United had 81 Dreamliners at the end of 2025 and American had 70, while Delta had none. Fleet size is only one way to rank them, and our Delta vs United vs American comparison covers the rest.