LONDON – Qatar Airways has now confirmed the rumors surrounding the Boeing 777X Freighter order and is going ahead with this, as well as going for the 737 MAX.
The deal was signed today at the White House for 50 up to 737 MAXs, including 25 options, and will be a Memorandum of Understanding.
As for the 777X Freighter order, Qatar Airways will order 34 firm units, with the option to take an additional 16, bringing that count also to 50, with the overall result being 100 units for Boeing.
This means that Qatar Airways has placed an eye-watering $30bn investment into Boeing, giving confidence to both the MAX and also for the beginning of Boeing’s future freighter portfolio.
This news also confirms what al-Baker said at a U.S Chamber of Commerce event around 10 months ago to which he said:
“As far as the freighter goes… we will definitely be interested in looking into it because by the time any new launch of a program by either Boeing or Airbus is announced, it will be at a time when we are going to be looking into starting to replace our current Boeing 777 aircraft, with modern state of the art fuel-efficient aircraft”.
The 50 737 MAXs ordered match the 50 Airbus A321neos it lost in its order book following the surface degradation fight on the Airbus A350.
