Editor’s Note: as of 11 March 2019, Comair’s Boeing 737 MAX 8 operating under the British Airways banner with a registration of ZS-ZCA has been grounded by the airline. Read more here.
Original article: Comair, the operator of British Airways and Kulula in South Africa, on Thursday evening took delivery of the country’s first Boeing 737 8 MAX aircraft.
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The plane landed at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport just after 8.30pm.
The 737 8 MAX is the next generation of the popular 737 passenger plane from American firm Boeing.
If you’ve ever travelled between Johannesburg and Cape Town, you’d most likely find yourself on one of the older -400 or -800 series versions of these planes.
More than 10 000 of these planes in their various guises and revisions have been built to date, while just less than 5000 planes are still on order from carriers around the world.
Registered ZS-ZCA, Comair’s new aircraft began its journey home from Seattle on 26 February, and stopped over in the Dominican Republic before crossing the Atlantic to the Cape Verde Islands, according to data from flight tracking service FlightRadar24.
The plane is the first of eight 737 8 MAX aircraft on order through to 2022, notes aviation publication CH-Aviation. It will fly under the British Airways banner, and joins Comair’s 28 operational commercial aircraft.
While Comair is the first South African carrier to own a 737 8 MAX, it’s not the first in Africa. That honour belongs to Mauritania Airlines which took delivery of its first plane in December 2017.
Ethiopian followed in mid-2018, and will have the largest 737 MAX fleet once all 30 of its orders are delivered.
Feature image: Comair
