10,000th 737 delivered to SW - Guinness record
 

You can argue stats about who sold more in the last decade, but this is still quite an achievement.

Gee - I didn't realise SW's fleet was *that* big...!
Dean

SW is the #1 pax carrying airline within the USA and has the largest fleet of B737's in the World.

I got it Deanm.

Phew!
Thanks Framer!

I can remember when Mr B thought they'd made a dreadful error as only European airlines were interested............

Boeing rarely got it right with the -100 variant of any of their products. :O

As an aside, when the 737 was fairly new, a man from Boeing in Texas, when realising I was British, mentioned that Britannia had the highest utilisation in the world. IIRC, 19 3/4 hours.

715 in Southwest’s fleet.

:eek: that is incredible.

427 for Ryanair ain't too shabby for a European Upstart.

I think if you hit a sales figure of 10,000 you can be assured you got it right..;)

Yes, but only 0.3% of those were 737-100s. :O

Soon it'll overtake the DC3/ C47 series in overall sales!

IIRC at one time Britannia were operating the 737 with the highest airframe hours in the world - G-AWSY, a (very) Basic -200 with -9 engines.

I need new glasses. I read that and wondered where they put the other seven engines.

@ llondell

For '-9' read (when you've got your new specs) 'JT8D-9'. Later (Advanced) models of the FLUF had JT8D-15 engines. Thought I'd better write that in full to avoid 'where did they put the other 13 engines' comments.

G-SY used to swap places with another aircraft for the world’s highest time/cycle B737-200. Can’t recall which other aircraft was involved. When SY went into the hangar for a seriously major engineering check Boeing sent a team over and paid for it to be torn to bits and reassembled as it provided a unique insight into how the airframe was performing. I spent many happy hours flying around in that aircraft hoping it didn’t fall to bits! Just retired after 43 years flying, most of it on 737 variants. Great aeroplane.

Well when I first read it I thought they meant SW has 10000 737s:}

Yep they certainly did
Unfortunately they didn't see to upgrade it properly!

Old Design?
 

2 pence's worth...

Another way of looking at this record is that Boeing have procrastinated too long over replacing such an ancient design. Since the introduction of the A320 Airbus have helped themselves to a very large slice of the market, with Boeing failing to introduce a superior, or even equal, design to compete. Yes, the 737 family's sales figures have been healthy, but really they ought to be regarded as a significant under-performance. Boeing could have preserved their percentage market share of the 1980s, 1970s, but ceded that without much of a fight.

If Boeing had introduced a new design 25, 30 years ago, and made it extremely hard for Airbus to win sales on technical merit alone, we'd now be looking at a very different Boeing to the one we know today. Airbus's unfettered success has been a 30 year indicator that Boeing has needed to do something, and the row over the very effective C Series is an indicator that the writing is being written on the wall.

Boeing can still regain their former leading position, but every A320neo sale that happens now is yet another 737 (or its successor) that isn't sold. Half-baked solutions like 737-MAX simply gives Airbus even longer to make huge money from the A320neo family, and leaves the field open for aircraft like the C series to take a massive slice of the smaller end of the market.