At 18:51 on the evening of 8 September, a Boeing 737-8 registered YR-BGO touched down at Henri Coandă in Bucharest, having flown in directly from the United States. It is the first 737 MAX Tarom has ever operated, and the first in Romania.

Boeing, Tarom and the lessor CDB Aviation marked the delivery formally on 12 September. The aircraft seats 189, carries manufacturer’s serial number 60196, and has been named Mircea Lucescu after the Romanian football manager, with the family granting the name rights free of charge. It flew a short circuit over Bucharest for the cameras and entered scheduled service on 15 September, on the Amsterdam route.

It is a genuinely good day for an airline that has not had many. It is also arriving at a very particular moment.

A fleet with very little left in it

Tarom today operates around ten aircraft and serves more than 50 destinations, most of the latter through codeshares. The jet fleet is four 737 Next Generation airframes, the 737-700s and 737-800s that the MAX is intended to replace. Regional flying is done by ATR 72-600s. The Airbus A318s, always an odd fit, were fully withdrawn by October 2024.

The airline was founded in 1954 and has been a SkyTeam member since 2010. It sits under the Ministry of Transportation, which is the root of both its survival and its difficulty.

The transformation process is behind schedule

Anghel’s word is doing a lot of work. On 29 April 2024 the European Commission approved 95.3 million euros of Romanian restructuring state aid for Tarom, made up of a debt write-off of the earlier rescue aid plus a capital injection. The approval came with conditions: cuts to the route network and the fleet, and a restructuring plan that has to demonstrate viability by 31 December 2026.

It is not going well. Tarom has not reported an operating profit since 2008, apart from a gain on an asset sale in 2024. In the first eight months of 2025 it lost around 30 million euros against a projected 5 million euro profit, with negative EBITDA of 9 million against a projected positive 30 million. Full-year 2025 losses came in at 186 million lei. The airline wrote to the Commission in October 2025 to admit it had missed its forecasts.

Chief executive Bogdan Costaș was dismissed in July 2026 and replaced by Anghel. At the end of that month, acting transport minister Radu Miruță said a revised restructuring plan would be filed with Brussels in September, citing fuel prices and aircraft delivery delays. If the Commission is not satisfied that the airline is viable by the end of the year, the aid can be withdrawn, and withdrawal would mean bankruptcy.

Romanian coverage of the new aircraft joining the Tarom fleet.

Two aircraft, or four

There is a small but telling discrepancy in the numbers. Boeing’s own release of 12 September describes YR-BGO as the first of two aircraft leased from CDB Aviation. Tarom said in August that it was the first of four MAX aircraft that will enter the fleet. Both statements are on the record. The safe reading is two firm, with the airline signalling an intention to reach four, and a second aircraft due this autumn.

The commercial logic of the MAX for an airline in this position is straightforward enough. A 737-8 burns meaningfully less fuel than the 737-800 it displaces, and fuel is precisely the cost line Miruță blamed for the missed targets. Leasing rather than buying keeps it off the balance sheet. The aircraft will fly to Paris, Amsterdam and Madrid, and domestically to Cluj.

Whether one modern narrowbody, or two, or four, can shift the arithmetic of an airline that has lost money for the better part of two decades is a different question, and Brussels will answer it before the year is out.

Sources: Boeing; FlightGlobal; Aviation24.be; Romania Insider; European Commission decision IP/24/2321; ch-aviation.