A year ago Turkish Airlines said it wanted up to 225 Boeing aircraft. Then the deal stalled, the airline started talking publicly about Airbus instead, and the whole thing looked like it might come apart over engines.

On Wednesday it was signed, in New York, with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan standing over it. Turkish Airlines has bought 100 Boeing 737-8s outright and taken options on 50 more. It is the largest single-aisle order in the airline’s history.

The part that took a year to settle was not the airframe.

The Engine Fight

Boeing announced the intent a year ago. The delay that followed was, as we reported earlier this month, largely about CFM International — the GE and Safran joint venture that builds the LEAP-1B, the only engine the 737 MAX is offered with. The disagreement covered price and, just as importantly, the terms of long-term engine maintenance.

That is a more significant fight than it sounds. On a modern narrowbody the engines and their maintenance contracts represent an enormous share of lifetime cost, and unlike the A320neo family, the MAX gives a customer no second engine to play off against the first. An airline ordering 150 MAX aircraft is committing to one engine supplier for twenty years and knows it.

Turkish Airlines pushed back the only way it could: by talking openly about switching the order to Airbus. Whatever it extracted in the end, the order is now firm.

What 150 Narrowbodies Actually Buy

Turkish Airlines is not a normal flag carrier. It flies to 358 destinations in 133 countries — 305 of them international — from a hub that sits within a few hours of most of Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. That model runs on narrowbodies. The 787s do the long haul; the 737s do the actual work of connecting Istanbul to several hundred cities that will never support a widebody.

The substitution right for the 737-10 matters here too. It lets the airline decide later, route by route, whether it wants the 737-8’s range and flexibility or the -10’s seat count, without renegotiating.

Boeing, for its part, got something it badly needed: a marquee single-aisle order, signed at head-of-state level, for the aircraft that carries most of its commercial recovery.

The Political Layer

Erdoğan’s presence at the signing was not decoration. Both the Boeing release and the airline’s own statement go out of their way to mention Türkiye’s aviation ecosystem and industrial participation — the standard language for work-share commitments that land supplier contracts inside the buying country.

Large aircraft orders have been an instrument of Turkish trade policy for years, and this one arrives alongside a 2025 commitment for up to 75 787 Dreamliners. Between them, those two deals represent one of the largest fleet-renewal programmes any airline has committed to this decade.

Boeing says the MAX family burns 20 per cent less fuel than the aircraft it replaces. For a carrier of Turkish Airlines’ size, that claim, if it holds, is worth more over the fleet’s life than the discount it spent a year fighting for.

Sources: Boeing news release, 23 September 2026; aeroTELEGRAPH; Bloomberg; AGBI; Daily Sabah.