‘Damaged’ MAX brand should be dropped, says Boeing customer Air Lease

The chairman of major aircraft leasing firm Air Lease, which has 150 of Boeing’s grounded 737 MAX jet on order, on Monday called on the U.S. manufacturer to drop the “damaged” MAX brand to avoid it undermining the plane’s value. The comments by Steven Udvar-Hazy, one of the founders of the airplane leasing industry which finances around half of the world’s passenger fleet, echoes a call by U.S. President Donald Trump in April last year to “rebrand” its 737 MAX jetliner.

Boeing said last June it had no plans to change the name of the jet. “We’ve asked Boeing to get rid of that word MAX,” Udvar-Hazy told the Airline Economics aviation finance conference in Dublin. “I think that word MAX should go down in the history books as a bad name for an aircraft.”