This blog is counting down to the day the 10,000 Boeing 737 is delivered. This may prompt you to ask: when will this day likely be? Luckily, based on Boeing's statements about production rates, this question can be answered fairly easily. Boeing is currently producing 31.5 737s a month. From early 2012 this will increase to 35 a month, and then to 38 a month in the second quarter of 2013, before hitting 42 airframes a month by the first half of 2014. At the end of June 2011, there had been a total of 6819 deliveries. Obviously these aren't precise times, and I imagine production-ramp up isn't an instant step change, but by assuming that production goes from one level to the other during the given periods, we can make an estimate of how much longer it will take to deliver the remaining 3181 needed to hit 10,000. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations we arrive at the period of March-April 2018. Interestingly, this would be just over 50 years after the 737 entered service with Lufthansa in February 1968. Assuming the 737 makes this date, it will also be the first civil airliner of any type to have been in production for 50 years. The 10,000th may come even earlier - Boeing has flagged that it is looking at increasing the production rate to 60 airframes a month in the longer term.
A question to readers - who do you think will take the 10,000th Boeing 737?
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