Just three years after the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 shortly after takeoff from Jakarta precipitated a chain of events leading to the worldwide grounding of Boeing’s flagship 737 Max 8 plane, a strange thing is happening.
The single-aisle jet — whose crashes in Indonesia and, less than five months later, outside Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, “exposed fraudulent and deceptive” behavior and criminal misconduct by Boeing employees, in the words of the U.S. Department of Justice — is looking more and more like becoming a commercial success story.
Mumbai-based startup Akasa Air announced an order Tuesday for 72 of the jets at the Dubai Airshow, a deal worth $9 billion at list prices.