The US Federal Aviation Administration certified the Boeing 737 MAX 10 on Tuesday, 20 October 2026, approving the largest version of the company's single-aisle family. The plane carries up to 230 passengers and is built to compete with Airbus's A321neo, and it had already collected more than 1,500 orders, including from United Airlines and Alaska Airlines. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy welcomed the decision in a statement.
“After extensive safety reviews, including thousands of hours of test flights, the team at the F.A.A. is ready to approve this critical aircraft for sale.”
Deliveries are now expected to begin in 2027, while the 737 MAX 10 was originally slated to start deliveries in 2023. The approval follows the certification of the smaller 737 MAX 7 in early August 2026.
The approval closes a process that stretched for years after two 737 MAX 8 crashes, in October 2018 and March 2019, that killed 346 people in total. Those accidents, which the regulator attributed to design problems, led to a grounding of the whole family for at least twenty months worldwide. The FAA then tightened its oversight of Boeing. It also required changes to the anti-stall software known as MCAS and to the anti-icing system of the LEAP-1B engines made by CFM International, which risked overheating during prolonged use. The MAX 10 was presented in 2017 and first flew on 18 June 2021.
In mid-September, Boeing chief executive Kelly Ortberg said he expected certification very soon, since test flights were complete and only documentation and process steps with the FAA remained. A bug in a navigation software update affecting some 737 aircraft then led the FAA to suspend the process at the end of September. The suspension came after a separate in-flight incident on an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 8, in which a fuselage door plug came off because attachment bolts had been missing when the aircraft left the factory a few weeks earlier. The 20 October approval ends that pause.
Boeing builds the MAX 10 at its Everett plant near Seattle, on a North Line launched on 6 July 2026 that is the only line able to assemble the aircraft from start to finish. The older MAX plant at Renton, about 50 km away, has three assembly lines but is too small for the larger model. Boeing's latest published data show 1,702 MAX 10 jets in the order backlog at the end of September, compared with 285 MAX 7 jets. United Airlines has reportedly ordered the largest number of MAX 10s, according to public information.
Data from the article text
Boeing expects to start deliveries of the MAX 10 in 2027. The company wants to regain competitiveness and reduce its debt, and the approval is an important step toward that goal. The certification caps a saga disrupted by two fatal crashes and a series of quality lapses. Airbus, which in recent years became the world's top airplane manufacturer, is the rival Boeing now hopes to catch up with.
Pollar is free and carries no ads in the text. Its members keep it going.
Support PollarTransport · Everett and Renton
The US Federal Aviation Administration has certified the 737 MAX 10, the largest version of Boeing's single-aisle family, after a suspension in late September tied to a navigation software bug.
AI text based on reports by Il Sole 24 ORE, RTBF, La Libre.be and other publishers. Published .