Among the many companies filing Q3 earnings this week is aircraft maker Boeing ($BA), still trying to shake off years of financial and operational disruption from the disastrous crashes of two Boeing 737-Max jets in the late 2010s and subsequent regulatory and legal settlements in the early 2020s.

Nobody would claim Boeing has returned to form yet, and the company did just post a $116 million net loss for the quarter — but when you examine Boeing’s disclosures about order backlog, perhaps one could say the company’s worst turbulence is behind it.

What makes those backlog disclosures so interesting is that Boeing reports them in two ways: as a dollar amount, which now stands at $745 billion; and as number of planes on order, which stands at 6,300.

This lets us do some clever analysis to see whether Boeing’s growth in backlog is enough to support growth in revenue. 

We can start with the monetary backlog. That $745 billion reported in Q3 is an all-time high for Boeing, and essentially double where backlog stood at the start of 2022. See Figure 1, below; and particularly note the slope of that trend-line in red.

That metric only sings a one-note song, however. We next compared growth in backlog to growth in revenue for the last three years, and discovered this pleasant harmony seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2 tells us that backlog (in blue) is rising at a rate broadly in step with revenue (in red). Since backlog today becomes revenue tomorrow, that means backlog is currently growing quickly enough to support revenue growth for the foreseeable future.

Just for kicks, we also measured backlog as a multiple of TTM revenue for the same three years. The result is Figure 3, below.

Are those swings from 6.92 to 8.22 back to 7.85 large enough to be concerning for Boeing’s long-term revenue picture? Honestly, we at Calcbench don’t know — but we do have the data available with just a few keystrokes to let analysts perform this sort of exercise if that’s what you want to do.