The US Federal Aviation Administration certified Boeing's 737-10 on Tuesday, the largest member of the 737 MAX family. That means Boeing can start handing them over in the coming months, after years in which airlines could order the plane but not fly it.
Plenty of airlines are waiting. More than 30 customers have ordered 1,555 of them, more than three in every ten MAX jets on Boeing's order book, and United, Delta, American, Alaska and Ryanair are among the biggest. Boeing says the plane will be a major driver of cash flow as it recovers from years of crises.
Why it took this long
Boeing has been trying to get the plane certified since the early 2020s. The process got stricter after two MAX 8 crashes in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people, and scrutiny of Boeing's factories rose again after a cabin panel blew out of a nearly new Alaska Airlines MAX 9 in January 2024.
The 737-10 is the first commercial plane certified to the full extent of a 2020 US law that demands more documentation of safety assessments and of how people interact with the aircraft. It flew more than 2,000 hours in testing, on top of 1,000 hours of ground tests, and it introduces an upgraded angle-of-attack system, the sensors that tell the plane how steeply its nose meets the oncoming air, which will become standard across the MAX family.
What airlines get, and what Airbus got
In return for the wait, airlines get the biggest 737 yet: between 185 and 210 passengers in two classes, and a range of up to 5,740km. Boeing says it has the lowest cost per seat of any single-aisle plane in service.
The delay has had a price. While the plane sat in certification, Airbus's A321neo took a bigger share of the market for large single-aisle jets, Reuters reports. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the country wants to beat the Europeans and the Chinese, and that to do it he has to let the industry certify aircraft faster.
Boeing still has a queue of its own. The smaller 737 MAX 7 was approved in August after a review lasting more than eight years, and the 777-9, its largest jetliner in production, is still waiting, six years behind schedule.
