The Max has been grounded worldwide since March after a pair of crashes killed 346 people.
India’s
SpiceJet Ltd. is weighing an order for at least 100 Airbus SE planes
as Boeing Co. grapples with the fallout over its grounded 737 Max.
The
budget carrier, a major global customer for the Max, may buy a
“sizable” number of Airbus A321LR and XLR jets to accommodate a
planned expansion, SpiceJet
Chairman Ajay Singh said Tuesday.
No
decision has been made, he said, and the airline would consider a
competing midrange jetliner if Boeing decides to build one.
Airbus
has “pushed us hard since the day we started flying Boeing
aircraft, and of course with the current problems, they’ve
pushed us harder,” Singh said in an interview at Bloomberg’s
headquarters in New York. “They have made us a commercial offer and
we are evaluating it.”
The
discussions with Airbus threaten Boeing with a high-profile defection
at a time when the U.S. planemaker is enmeshed in one of the biggest
crises in its 103-year history. SpiceJet, India’s second-largest
airline, has 13 Max jets already in its fleet and has committed to
buy as many as 205 of the single-aisle workhorses as it expands
capacity to handle the nation’s fast-growing demand for air travel.
While
Singh didn’t specify the exact size of a potential transaction, he
said “any aircraft order that SpiceJet places would at least be 100
aircraft.” That would value the deal in excess of $13 billion,
based on 2018 list prices before customary discounts for the A321neo.
The LR and XLR variants are longer-range variants of the plane.
The
Max has been grounded worldwide since March after a pair of crashes
killed 346 people. More than six months later, the timing of the
return to service remains unclear as regulators worldwide conduct
independent assessments of the jet’s airworthiness.
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