Good News For 737 MAX

The good news for the Boeing 737 MAX continues with Indian customer Akasa Air voicing its praises.

In an interview with PTI, the airline’s CEO, Vinay Dube, said there was finally greater confidence in Boeing’s delivery schedule.

For years now, deliveries have been delayed. While frustrating for airlines like Akasa Air, given that it’s still trying to establish its operations, the uncertainty it brings is even more frustrating.

Driven by many supply chain woes and production caps, not only have planes been delayed in delivery, but Boeing has not been able to provide customers with a schedule it can stick to, creating uncertainty from a fleet-planning standpoint.

Akasa Air, like Ryanair, has gone big on the 737 MAX program, with hundreds of aircraft from this series having been ordered; this relatively new Indian carrier believes this will be the model to drive its growth.

The positivity surrounding the jet extends beyond the basics of recent deliveries, with Dube saying there is finally greater predictability about the future of the schedule.

With that in mind, Akasa Air will now also plan to recommence hiring, primarily seeking first officers in 2026 as new deliveries ramp up.

Boeing receiving positive feedback from a vital customer, such as Akasa Air, validates the work it has put in over the last two years to fundamentally right systemic wrongs that had affected productivity and quality.

A 737 MAX Production Increase

The positivity from Akasa Air regarding 737 MAX deliveries and production rates stems from the FAA’s October confirmation that Boeing had been given the green light to raise the monthly output rate.

The approval received from the Federal Aviation Adminsitration (FAA) follows close to two years’ worth of caps on output rates imposed by the governing regulator to try to put an end to persistent quality slips.

During this period, Boeing had not been able to produce more than 38 737 MAX jets per month, and for the vast majority of the almost two-year period, due to supply chain discomfort, it was not even hitting this figure to begin with.

Only in recent months has Boeing stabilised enough to reach the capped figure. It has now been given the green light to increase its monthly rate to 42.

While perceived as an incremental increase compared to the sizeable backlog for the popular single-aisle, this further validates the work Boeing has put into the program.

The FAA knows it cannot stretch Boeing forever. Still, the increases, however, will be subject to the Federal Aviation Administration’s oversight of production processes to ensure that the ramp-up does not result in quality slips.

Those quality slips remain the arguably biggest concern in recent times. In the process of getting approval for a rate rise, the pair discussed in depth what the increase would look like and how quality would be maintained.

Other Airlines’ Current Feelings

Akasa Air’s views on the 737 MAX are not isolated; the positivity is spreading across the industry among several leading customers of the program.

In August, Copa Airlines discussed the visible improvement that it had been experiencing throughout the year in its quarterly earnings call.

The airline said that, thus far, deliveries of the 737 MAX, while still delayed, are coming earlier than Boeing had outlined in its latest schedule.

The company forecasts that throughout 2026, with the prospects of further production rate increases, this theme will continue, with the planemaker delivering aircraft ahead of the most recent schedule.

Ryanair, which has also been overly critical of Boeing’s product, is still affected by certification woes; however, it has noticed considerable progress in aircraft deliveries.

The budget European carrier had visible concerns for 2026 about the risk of delayed deliveries, which could substantially hamper the summer schedule. Still, with Boeing’s rates rising and deliveries starting to materialise, those concerns have eased.

A lot of work is still to be done for Boeing to prove the corner has firmly turned, but winning over customers from around the world once more represents an important step in the right direction.