On Friday, the longest variant of the Boeing 737 Max family has taken off on its maiden flight.
At around 10:10 am local time, the test aircraft, registered as N27751, departed from Renton Airport in the Seattle area with call sign Boeing 101 (BOE101). It flew over to Moses Lake, Washington, where it performed a low-pass, Flightradar24 tracking data shows.
The first flight comes with quite a significant delay, due to the worldwide grounding of the 737 Max which made the American aircraft manufacturer focus on developing a fix for existing aircraft, instead of getting new types in the air. Boeing originally rolled out the Max 10 to employees back in November 2019.
All four variants of the 737 Max family have now flown. Of those, the Max 10 has the longest cabin and highest seat capacity. The type, launched in mid-2017 to better compete with Airbus’ A321neo, will be certified for up to 230 total passengers, although a typical two-class configuration would seat around 200 people.
Jakob Wert is an aviation journalist from Germany. He built up the website IFN.news and is the Editor-In-Chief of International Flight Network.
