United Airlines has officially told Boeing to put the brakes on its 737 MAX 10 project for United, noting that production delays and certification concerns have forced United to plan for a fleet without an aircraft that was meant to be a cornerstone of its fleet renewal plan.
CEO Kirby Confirms United Airlines Has Told Boeing To Shift Focus From 737 MAX 10 To MAX 9
During yesterday’s J.P. Morgan Industrials Conference, CEO Scott Kirby said United had instructed Boeing to stop making MAX 10s and to focus on MAX 9s instead.
“We’ve asked Boeing to stop building Max 10s, which they’ve done, for us and start building Max 9s. It’s impossible to say when the Max 10 is going to get certified.”
While United has not canceled its 737 MAX 10 order, this pivot solidifies what United has hinted at for several weeks now…that it cannot realistically plan for the 737 MAX 10 to join its fleet as planned.
Practically, that presents a big challenge for United. United is in the midst of a multi-year fleet renewal plan that includes the delivery of over 500 new aircraft and a plan to retrofit the existing fleet to install seatback screens and mood lighting under an initiative it calls United Next.
One pillar of that plan is that United’s order of 277 MAX 10 aircraft (with options for 200 more) was slated to replace the aging fleet of 757-200 aircraft currently used on premium transcontinental flights and select transatlantic routes. These aircraft feature a dated onboard product and are reaching the age in which maintenance costs and concerns outweigh their usefulness.
United must now–and quickly–decide what to do. It faces a number of choices:
- Continue to operate the 757-200, perhaps even retrofitting it
- Install lie-flat seating on future 737 MAX 9 deliveries, as Singapore Airlines and flydubai have done on the 737 MAX 8
- Reconfigure some of its Airbus A321neo deliveries to feature lie-flat seating for deployment on premium routes
Concerning that last option, Kirby also confirmed that United is in talks with Airbus to receive more A321neo jets:
“We are in the market for A321s, and if we get a deal where the economics work, we’ll do something. If we don’t, we won’t and will wind up with more Max 9s.”
Recall that Kirby made a “secret” trip to France to meet with Airbus in January to discuss this very issue.
While my interest skews toward premium cabins, the 277 MAX 10s would not all have lie-flat seats. This order was also intended to help United grow domestically to better compete with American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and Delta Air Lines. With both Airbus and Boeing operating production lines at near-capacity, it appears inevitable that United’s ambitious plan to increase flying will be tempered.
CONCLUSION
United has officially put the brakes on its 737 MAX 10 order. While it has not canceled it and could conceivably still take deliveries if the aircraft is certified, it realistically is shifting focus to more 737 MAX 9 deliveries. Meanwhile, it is working with Airbus on a contingency plan, though it is unlikely to jump the (long) queue of customers already waiting. Once again, we see that Boeing must get its house in order.
Kirby spoke quite a bit at the conference and I will have more to say about some of his other remarks tomorrow.
image: @scottkirby / Instagram
Get a220s
Good plane but I don’t think those are a viable 757 replacement
The larger ones make a good 737 replacement
Lies, lies, lies, United said nothing of the sort. Your headline and leads all say United told Boeing to just stop building the plane – that is, cancel the project. They did not. They told Boeing to stop building those planes FOR UNITED, that is, United no longer wants them. They gave Boeing no instructions about what to do for other airlines (not that it’s United’s place to do that..only in the mind of this idiot…).
What a pile of completely ignorant slop this blog is!
Stop building the plane for United. It’s quite clear – sorry you have reading comprehension issues.
The question is: would the FAA allow UAL to add the current Max 10 manufacturing/engineering capacity to the Max 9….? i doubt it at this point, Boeing has fibbed too often.
United will have no choice but to take those MAX-10s once the type is certified, even if far out into the future, which is increasingly likely. It’s either that or convert them to MAX-9 orders. UA won’t have an easy time finding delivery slots for the A321s it craves as a replacement for the MAX10.
If the “economics works”. United wants a state of the art aircraft at bargain basement pricing.
United has plenty of problems of their own making, such as hydraulic leaks, wheels falling off, veering off the runway and collapsing the landing gear, pilot induced diving toward the Pacific off Hawaii, etc.
Don’t forget their funniest problem, DEI
DEI…what a gongshow. I left Boeing because of DEI. I was a software test engineer there, but as a white, middle-aged, heterosexual male I knew I had no future. Companies are losing people with years of skills and experience all in the cause of an initiative. Luckily, I found a gig at an old-school environment where you can tell jokes, yuck it up with you fellow workers and say a simple hello to a female co-worker without the fear of being reported to human resources.
Maybe you weren’t as qualified as you think you are? Or maybe the issue is profit seeking over a quality product especially as Boeing is hiring finance and hedge fund people to run the company instead of promoting people with more of a technical background for management positions. But hey, lets blame DEI as a convenient scapegoat instead.
Also:
“say a simple hello to a female co-worker without the fear of being reported to human resources.”
Tell us you are an incel without telling us you are an incel.
DEI is usually only a problem for racists.
Careful, that’s at least 25% of the readership here (high correlation too w/the incels)
Or stop the Mad Max altogether. That’s why they want to buy more Airbus.