Originally Posted by
rickair7777
Backlog for new orders is at least six years, in part thanks to Max.
Exactly. United is aggressively going after used planes and have picked up other airlines Max orders. Love them, or hate them, but United and Southwest are going to have a ton of them running around. Hindsight is always 20/20, but at the time that the decision was made to go with the Max, it made sense. Not the best plane from a pilot’s perspective, but it is efficient, and will make the airlines plenty of money. It can’t take as much cargo, it doesn’t have the range, and it doesn’t have equal short field performance, but the max will still do the vast majority of what the 757 actually does do. It will fly SFO to places like EWR, MCO, and BOS, all day long on 2,000 less pounds of fuel per hour. Any new NB plane out of Boeing is years away and not an option.