Boeing's 737 Max wooed airlines with its cost-saving fuel economy

Why do airlines love the Boeing 737 Max? In a word: money. This is a plane that promised to cut fuel and maintenance bills, fly further and cram in more passengers – manna to airline executives and shareholders. More than 5,000 of the new Max planes have been ordered, mostly the Max 8 iteration, allowing Boeing to maintain the 737’s historic chart-topping sales in the face of competition from the Airbus A320 family’s latest “neo” planes. While both manufacturers have launched more daring ventures with greater fanfare and mixed fortunes – Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner and the A380 superjumbo from Airbus – the Max was something else: a plane that didn’t rip up the model, but more or less matched the familiar, shorthaul workhorse. It replicated what airlines had already got, only better, lighter, and cheaper to fuel and maintain. Buyers queued from every continent. In the UK, even the doomed Monarch ordered dozens, though the airline couldn’t quite hang on long enough to reap the forecasted annual savings of up to E3m a plane. At a relatively affordable price, the Max – a single-aisle plane – had a flying range that opened up the possibility of using it on long-haul corridors traditionally the preserve of wide-body jetliners – an opportunity taken by Norwegian to fly new routes across the Atlantic. Story has more.<br/>