Summary
- African airline Royal Air Maroc has committed to buying two additional 787-9 Dreamliners from Boeing to expand its long-haul network and benefit from favorable market conditions.
- Royal Air Maroc has a long-standing partnership with Boeing and has been operating Boeing aircraft for many of its existence.
- The airline can be trying to further expand its fleet and has expressed interest in quadrupling its size before 2037.
African airline Royal Air Maroc has added to Boeing’s storming first day on the Dubai Airshow 2023, with a firm commitment for an extra two 787-9 Dreamliners. The order was previously listed in Boeing’s orders and deliveries as an ‘unidentified customer,’ but was revealed today in the ultimate hours of day 1 of the 2023 airshow.
Abdelhamid Addou, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Royal Air Maroc, commented on the order, saying,
“The 2 Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners will enable Royal Air Maroc to expand within the short-term its long-haul network in response to the highly favorable market conditions in 2023.”
Royal Air Maroc already operates a small fleet of nine Dreamliners, split between five 787-8s and 4 787-9s. The alternative of the larger variant of the Dreamliner is telling, because the carrier is clearly having fun with the upper capability that the larger aircraft provides.
55 years of RAM and Boeing
Royal Air Maroc has been a solid customer of Boeing’s aircraft for many of its existence. Launched in 1957 with DC-3s, Bretagnes, and Laguedocs, the airline added Caravelles and Constellations in its early years, but made its first order with Boeing in 1969. RAM took delivery of its first Boeing, a 727-200, in 1970, and started constructing out its Boeing fleet from there. By 1976, the Caravelles were withdrawn from service, and the airline became all-Boeing.
Photo: Vincenzo Pace | Easy Flying
Today’s Royal Air Maroc flies a complete of 54 aircraft, all of them Boeing, other than a handful of Embraer regional jets, a single ARJ100, and a half dozen ATRs. To triple the fleet would mean increasing it to around 150 aircraft, so we could yet see one other big order from this interesting African airline.
Its relatively latest status as oneworld’s first African airline will undoubtedly have opened up opportunities throughout the marketplace for RAM, and it seems the airline is capitalizing on the massive demand for international flying we’re seeing within the wake of the pandemic. The query stays, will it follow its all-Boeing strategy, or could we see a switch to Airbus for the upper capability of the A350 in a future order?