Trump praises Boeing after the flydubai 737 MAX descent
By Michal Zembol
Published . Developing story. Details below distinguish what organisations have confirmed from claims that are still under investigation.
Donald Trump congratulated Boeing and chief executive Kelly Ortberg, saying the 737 MAX stayed together under strain beyond its design. He had previously called the same model cursed. Investigators have not published the loads or speeds.
On 1 October 2026, President Donald Trump congratulated Boeing for the 737 MAX. In a social media post he said the aircraft had withstood G-forces and strain far beyond what it was designed and expected to do. He called that a display of structural planning, described Boeing's airliners as the finest in service, and said it was time the MAX was given credit. He addressed the congratulations to chief executive Kelly Ortberg and to the company's other executives.
Trump is in his second term as president of the United States. He often comments on companies in public, and Boeing is one he has returned to for years. Thursday's post is that habit applied to a jet that had diverted the day before. Aerospace Global News carried the message after the flydubai landing at Tabuk. Investing.com noted that the post praised the design and Ortberg, and did not itself describe the flight.
He had already spoken about the descent away from that post. Aerospace Global News reported that he told reporters in the Oval Office the aircraft was travelling at a speed it was never designed to reach. That is his description. Boeing has not published a speed or a structural load for the flight. Saudi and UAE investigators have not said whether the jet went outside its certified limits.
The praise reverses things Trump has said about the same aircraft. In January 2024, after a door plug detached from an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9, he wrote on Truth Social that Boeing should bring back the 757. He called the 757 the most beautiful and best-handling aircraft the company had made, from a pilot's point of view, and told Boeing to stop extending the 737, which he called the worst-looking plane in the air. He wrote that buyers were left with the MAX, asked how that had worked out, and said it seemed cursed.
The curse he meant was two earlier crashes. Lion Air flight 610 in 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 in 2019 killed everyone on board, and regulators grounded the 737 MAX worldwide. In a Truth Social post in September 2023 he blamed those crashes on Boeing's choice to stretch the 737 rather than build a new aircraft. He wrote that the disasters would not have happened if the company had listened to him. During his first term, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered that grounding. He is now praising the model he then treated as a failure.
The 757 is not an abstract preference. Boeing stopped building it in 2004. Trump uses one as his private aircraft, and in the January 2024 post he pointed to that when he told the company to restart the line. Thursday's message puts the MAX, the type he had dismissed, in the place he usually reserves for the 757.
None of that makes the structural claim a finding. flydubai has said the aircraft that diverted was damaged. Photographs after the landing appear to show damage to the rudder. Tracking data show a drop of more than 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds. Those facts describe a hard event and a damaged tail. They do not measure the loads Trump described, and the airline has not adopted his account of the airframe.
The flight was FZ1073, from Dubai to Tel Aviv on 30 September. It landed at Tabuk after an altercation on the flight deck. Trump's post is a reaction from a president who has argued about this aircraft in public since the crashes of 2018 and 2019. It is not the investigation.