Flight Friday: Alaska Airlines MAX 9 Incident Reshapes Boeing 737 Landscape

As a new year begins, this week’s Flight Friday looks back to an event that happened one year ago: the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-9 (MAX 9) door plug blowout on Jan. 5, 2024, and the impact and effects that had on MAX 9 utilization.

Starting with data from after the MAX was recertified in late 2020, the MAX 9 in-service fleet (ISF) has slowly risen from around 30 in January 2021, up to over 230 in November 2024. The North American market is the largest for the MAX 9, where it accounts for two-thirds of the overall ISF.

As the fleet has grown, so have the aggregated monthly hours and cycles. As the Northern Hemisphere summer months show, the MAX 9 is operating on average almost 350 hours per month and over 100 cycles per month, leading to a 3+ hour average sector length during these busy months. Now that the Northern Hemisphere winter schedule has come into effect, the utilization naturally drops as operators take the opportunity to complete maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) on the fleet, with utilization dropping to around 300 hours per month and completing around 90 cycles.

The outlier to the above is January 2024 in the immediate aftermath of the Alaska Airlines incident, where aircraft remained on the ground while inspections were made to the fleet to make sure they didn’t have similar potential door plug issues.

The MAX 9 makes up a little under 15% of the MAX ISF. However, within the North American MAX fleet it accounts for almost a quarter of the MAX ISF. Latin America is the next largest operator of the MAX 9; however, the Latin American operators utilize their fleet with a slightly longer average stage length as they spend a lot of their time plying their trade between Latin and North America.

Aviation Week’s 2025 Commercial Fleet & MRO Forecast projects that the MAX 9 fleet should double in size between now and 2030 and shall continue to be an important aircraft in the “Americas.”

This data was put together using Aviation Week’s Tracked Aircraft Utilization tool.