Lufthansa Just Bought a Boeing It Has Never Flown

Lufthansa Group’s supervisory board signed off on 20 Boeing 737 MAX 10s on 17 September, a decision worth roughly 3.4 billion dollars at list prices. What makes it notable is not the money, which is a list figure nobody actually pays, but the model. The MAX 10 is the longest member of Boeing’s single-aisle family, and until this week no Lufthansa Group airline had ever ordered one. The group has flown 737s before, decades ago, and it ordered 40 MAX 8s in 2023. The MAX 10 is new territory for a fleet planner who has spent twenty years buying Airbus narrowbodies almost exclusively.

The order is not fresh money so much as a decision already half made. When Lufthansa committed to those 40 MAX 8s in 2023, it also took 60 purchase options spanning the MAX family. This week’s move converts the first 20 of those options, and the interesting part is what it converts them into. The group could have taken more MAX 8s and kept the fleet simple. Instead it reached for the stretched version, which carries more seats over roughly the same trip lengths. That is a bet on density: more passengers per departure on routes where the slot, the gate and the crew cost the same either way.

Passengers will not see any of this for a long time. Deliveries are scheduled to begin in the early 2030s, which in aircraft-order terms is barely a commitment at all. The jets are earmarked to replace ageing Airbus A320-family aircraft spread across the group’s airlines, a fleet that includes Lufthansa mainline, Swiss, Austrian, Brussels Airlines, Eurowings and ITA Airways. Which of those carriers actually receives them has not been announced, and Lufthansa has historically kept that flexibility deliberately open until much closer to handover. The group’s narrowbody replacement programme runs well into the 2030s.

For Boeing the timing matters more than the volume. The MAX 10 is the variant that has waited longest for certification and has therefore been the hardest to sell, because airlines do not like ordering an aircraft whose entry into service keeps moving. A European flag carrier that has been an Airbus stronghold for a generation choosing the MAX 10 is the kind of endorsement that moves other campaigns. For travellers the practical read is simpler: the aircraft flying you around Europe on Lufthansa Group metal in 2033 is more likely to be American-built than at any point in recent memory.

Sources: FlightGlobal, AirlineGeeks