WestJet was built on the Boeing 737-700. On 28 September 2026 it started getting rid of them, and it did so in the same week the aeroplane meant to replace them lost its certification date.
The mechanism is an agreement with FTAI Aviation covering 27 aircraft. Seventeen go in a sale-and-leaseback, meaning WestJet sells them and keeps flying them for a while. Ten are bought outright off lease and will be worth more to FTAI in pieces than whole. WestJet’s own description of the deal is the useful line: this is the start of the retirement of the 737-700 fleet.
That is a quietly significant sentence for an airline whose entire identity was once a single aircraft type flown very cheaply out of Calgary.
Quick Facts
The deal — FTAI Aviation is taking 27 WestJet Boeing 737-700s, announced 28 September 2026: 17 on sale-and-leaseback, 10 bought outright off lease.
What WestJet calls it — the start of the retirement of its 737-700 fleet. No end date has been published.
Fleet position — Aviation Week’s fleet database lists 27 WestJet 737-700s in service with a further six inactive.
Where they go — the 17 leased aircraft into an FTAI aircraft-leasing vehicle; the 10 outright purchases feed FTAI’s CFM56-7B engine and module business.
The replacement — the Boeing 737 MAX 10, part of a 2025 order for 60 MAX 10s and seven 787-9s, the largest Boeing order ever placed by a Canadian carrier.
The complication — on 28 September 2026 the FAA delayed MAX 10 certification over a newly disclosed software issue.
The aeroplane that built the airline
WestJet took its first 737-700 in 2001, moving from second-hand 737-200s to a brand-new Next Generation fleet. For most of the two decades that followed, a 737-700 was simply what a WestJet aeroplane was: one aisle, two CFM56s, short enough runways to reach the places where the airline grew, and cheap enough per cycle to undercut the incumbent.
The fleet has moved on. Today the mainline operation runs 737-800s and MAX 8s, with 787-9s on long haul and a 2025 order for 60 MAX 10s and seven more 787-9s, the largest Boeing order ever placed by a Canadian airline. In that company the 737-700 is the odd one out: the smallest cabin, the oldest airframes, and the worst seat-mile cost of anything on the line.
Chief executive Alexis von Hoensbroech has been plain that there was no fixed retirement date before this, and that softer transborder demand and higher fuel costs moved the decision forward. That is the honest version of what usually gets written up as fleet simplification.
Why a lessor wants 27 twenty-year-old 737s
FTAI is not buying these aircraft because it is short of narrowbodies. It is buying them because of what is hanging under the wings.
The CFM56-7B is still the most widely installed engine on the planet, and the global shop-visit queue for it is long. FTAI’s aerospace products business sells engines and modules on exchange, which means it needs a steady supply of serviceable hardware it controls outright. Ten off-lease 737-700s is a supply of exactly that, with an airframe attached that it may or may not bother to fly again.
The seventeen sale-and-leaseback aircraft are a different trade: WestJet converts them into cash and keeps the capacity while it waits for new aeroplanes. Those are the ones that will carry passengers in WestJet colours for a while yet.
The cabin tour above is a reasonable record of what is going away: a single-aisle interior from the start of the century, built when a 737-700 was the modern option rather than the one at the back of the fleet list.
The gap that has just got wider
Retiring an aeroplane is only half a plan. The other half is the one arriving, and WestJet has said it expects its first 737-10 around the end of 2026.
On the same week as the FTAI announcement, the FAA said it was delaying certification of the MAX 10 after a newly disclosed software issue. The variant had finished certification flight testing earlier in the year, so this is a late problem rather than an early one, but a delay is a delay. Boeing shares fell sharply on the news.
This is where the sale-and-leaseback structure stops looking like financial engineering and starts looking like sensible planning. Seventeen 737-700s that WestJet still operates are seventeen aircraft that can keep flying schedules if the MAX 10 is late. Had the airline simply sold all 27 and walked away, a certification slip would have become a capacity hole.
What it means for the 737 Classic and NG market
WestJet is not alone. Across the industry the smallest Next Generation variants are being squeezed out first, because they carry the fewest passengers for roughly the same crew, fuel burn and maintenance bill as a 737-800. The engines keep their value. The airframes, increasingly, do not.
So the 737-700s will scatter. Some will fly on with leisure and charter operators who want a small jet with good runway performance and do not care about the last few per cent of fuel burn. Some will be stripped in the desert so that a 737-800 somewhere else can keep its engines on wing.
Neither outcome is dramatic. But it is the end of the aeroplane that turned a small Calgary start-up into Canada’s second-largest airline, and it begins on a week when its replacement is not yet legal to deliver.
Sources: FTAI Aviation release via GlobeNewswire, 28 September 2026; AviTrader, 28 September 2026; Aviation Week, 28 September 2026; CNBC and Bloomberg reporting on the FAA MAX 10 delay, 28 September 2026; WestJet fleet and order announcements. Both quotations are as issued by the companies.
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