Lufthansa has spent forty years as one of the most reliably Airbus-shaped airlines in Europe. On Wednesday evening its supervisory board signed off on twenty more Boeings — and specifically on the biggest 737 ever built.

The Lufthansa Group is exercising options for 20 Boeing 737 MAX 10 aircraft. List value is roughly USD 3.4 billion, though nobody pays list. Deliveries start in the early 2030s. And the jets are earmarked to replace older Airbus A320-family aircraft across the group’s airlines.

That last sentence is the story. Boeing metal is going to displace Airbus metal inside the Airbus heartland.

These options were always there

This is not a fresh competition that Boeing won. In 2023 Lufthansa ordered 40 MAX 8s and took 60 purchase options across the MAX family at the same time. Wednesday’s decision converts the first 20 of those options, and picks the MAX 10 rather than more MAX 8s.

So the headline number to watch is not 20. It is the 40 options still sitting unexercised.

Lufthansa puts the MAX 10 at roughly 30 percent better on fuel than the aircraft it replaces, and about 20 percent better on unit cost thanks to the extra seats. Both figures are the airline’s own and both compare against ageing A320-family jets rather than against a new A321neo, which is the comparison Airbus would prefer.

Why the MAX 10 and not more MAX 8s

The MAX 10 is the stretched end of the family: more seats per departure, the same crew, the same slot, the same landing fee. At congested European hubs where the constraint is slots rather than demand, seats per movement is the number that decides profitability.

It is also the MAX variant that took longest to arrive. The 737-10 first flew in June 2021 and certification ran years behind the original plan, which is part of why Lufthansa’s deliveries do not begin until the early 2030s.

The 737-10’s first flight from Renton in June 2021.

What it means for Airbus

Lufthansa is not abandoning Airbus. The group still has a very large Airbus backlog and expects to take more than 250 new aircraft of all types by 2035. But a European flag carrier choosing the largest Boeing narrowbody to replace Airbus narrowbodies is a useful thing for Boeing to be able to point at while it rebuilds its order book.

For passengers the practical change arrives late and quietly. Sometime early in the next decade, a short-haul flight out of Frankfurt or Munich that used to be an A320 will be a slightly longer aircraft with a Boeing badge, and almost nobody in seat 14C will notice.

Sources: Lufthansa Group newsroom, FlightGlobal, AirlineGeeks, Aviation Week, Boeing.