MAXing out

Boeing’s 737 MAX 10 stretches thinking around its half-century old narrowbody

Boeing’s double-stretched 737 MAX 10 narrowbody, capable of carrying up to 230 passengers over a 3215nm distance, was the talk of this year’s Paris Air Show. At 4.32m longer than the approximately 150 737-800 aircraft currently flying Australia’s skies, the MAX 10 is an attempt to capture more of the larger single-aisle market from Airbus after the A321neo outsold Boeing’s 737 MAX 9 by a factor of three or four, depending on the method of calculating orders.

“Our customers told us to build it bigger,” Boeing Commercial Airplanes chief executive officer Kevin McAllister said of the 737 MAX family when launching the MAX 10 at Le Bourget, and indeed the MAX 9’s sales suggested that Boeing had not previously put forward a suitable replacement for the middle-of-market segment, spanning the gap between the 220-seater, 3515nm-spanning 737 MAX 9, and the 787-8’s standard 242 passenger capacity and 7335nm range. Flying northwest from Sydney, that range gap equates to the space between Bali and eastern Turkey.