>>1972709The production version of the piece of shit won't be ready for test flight until at least 2030 and it won't be a 737 Max 9 competitor anyway. Max 9 is a narrow body aircraft. Let's look at the aircraft that could be considered true competitors to the Max 9:
>Airbus A320 familyThe biggest winners in this whole thing. They have the correct product, market position, and infrastructure in place to scoop up anyone having second thoughts about Max 9. The biggest player in the market is about to get bigger.
>UAC Tupolev Tu-204/21432 in active service. The only Western carrier is Cubana who operates 2 of them. Favored craft of North Korea's only commercial carrier. Tupolev is planning to make 10-20 per year as a stop-gap to serve the Russian market until the MC-21 is ready.
>UAC Irkut MC-210 in active service. Currently delayed because it was planned to use western engines and avionics and had to switch to Russian parts due to the sanctions. Currently denied European airworthiness certification. It'll probably be a big piece of shit like the SSJ100 is/was now that it'll be using Russian engines. Ton of orders from Russian carriers thanks to sanctions, none from anyone else, and no reason to think that it stands to benefit at all from this situation.
>Comac 919The fourth airframe was delivered literally a week ago. No European airworthiness cert yet, but that is supposedly coming. 700 orders of which 500 are to leasing companies, 200 are to commercial carriers, and every carrier is Chinese. There is potential, but as stated the fourth airframe was delivered a week ago so there is no real-world operating cost comparison between it and 737 or A320 yet. Acquisition costs are reportedly higher than A320 or 737 so there's already that knock against it.
The point in all of this is that currently there is only 1 competitor for 737 Max 9 that is realistically positioned to gain anything from its continued problems and it sure as hell ain't the Russians.
