Emirates may buy 100 Boeing 777X jets if new model built-report

Emirates Airlines, the world’s largest international passenger traffic carrier, is set to place an order of 100 jets with Boeing manufacturer worth billions of dollars, reported Arabian Business Thursday.

Emirates Airlines president Tim Clark said they will be ordering 100 planes or more if Boeing upgrades the design of the 777 aircraft with a newer model.

The order will account to a staggering estimate of $36 billion dollars.

“If Boeing produced the airplane that we want I can see easily that figure, bearing in mind that we’ve ordered 175 of them,” Clark said.

“If it’s as good as we hope it’ll be, it’s a natural thing to say ‘yes we would probably roll over what we have to what they’re offering with the new aircraft.’”

Boeing, which is based in Chicago, is the largest aircraft manufacturing company and has made deals with the Dubai-carrier previously after it purchased a single order of 50 units of the ER planes in November last year.

“We have been trying to get Boeing to build the 777-9x and 8x and we are working closely with them to try and persuade then that it’s a good idea to build it. We are not there yet,” Clark said.

“I guess if they had been there we would have done orders by now but they’re not. The moment you read that Boeing are launching the new 777 you will probably find that Emirates is fairly close behind,” he added.

Carriers such as Dubai’s Emirates Airline and British Airways had planned on the new mini-jumbo, provisionally called the 777X, entering service by the end of the current decade.

However, Boeing appears to be at least a year away from offering a new model of the 777.

Emirates Airlines, Boeing’s biggest customer, has been pressing for the 777X to come sooner rather than later. The 777 is one of the most successful jets of all time and airlines are eager for an amped-up version that can go farther on less fuel with more passengers.

“Our airplanes start retiring in 2017, the ERs that we have today... they will all have to go and be replaced at some point, so there is a kind of a natural rollover in terms of what we do,” explained Clark, as quoted by the news site.

According to Arabian Business, Emirates uses the 777-300ER to operate to South America, the U.S., Asia and Australia.