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The biggest customer for Boeing’s biggest plane is expressing its frustrations with the manufacturer as years-long delays run into production and delivery slowdowns that have come in the wake of an Alaska Airlines door plug blowout.
“We’re not happy really with what’s going on, we always really wanted to see this aircraft entering the fleet when it had been promised — and there is a delay, it’s not only to us,” Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, CEO of the Emirates airline, told CNBC.
Boeing has been producing and delivering far fewer planes than it did before the Alaska Airlines incident.
The Emirates 260-plane fleet, according to its most recent annual report, is made up of 144 Boeing 777s and 116 Airbus A380s. The company specializes in long-haul flights, and the 777 can be configured to take as many as 426 passengers on those flights. Emirates wants a whole lot more of those 777s, of which it operates more than anyone else: Boeing’s order backlog shows that Emirates is waiting for 208 of the 777x passenger variants, among 481 unfilled orders on the books.
Lots of airline executives have been expressing their discontent with wait times to get their Boeing planes. In some cases, like with United Airlines, they have taken to leasing aircraft from Boeing’s arch-competitor Airbus.
Al Maktoum declined to say whether his company was considering similar steps, but he did bring up that Emirates has been doing a years-long refurbishment project to spruce up its old planes while it waits for new ones. The most recent price tag placed on the effort was $2 billion, though the carrier just announced Tuesday that it was expanding it further.
Al Maktoum thinks Boeing can — or at least should be able to — handle all the pressure to figure things out. “I always say, you know, get your act together and just do it,” he told CNBC. “And I think they can do it.”