I’m on a roll now! Or at least it seems that way. After nearly a three month break from working on my airliner template project, I’ve wrapped up three in the past week: the Boeing 737 MAX 8, the 737-900/ER with split scimitar winglets, and now this 737 MAX 7. It feels really good to be making progress again and I’m really excited about keeping this momentum going for a while.
The subject of this post is, of course, my latest illustrations featuring the MAX 7. All in all, the only thing I really had to do to create these templates was to shorten the fuselage of the 737-8 MAX a bit and reposition a few details. That’s not to say there wasn’t any heartburn along the way though.
You see, about two weeks ago Boeing published an updated design for the 737-7 MAX which threw me for a loop (and required a lot of head scratching as I had to try and figure out what those changes were and how they affected the look of this airplane). Long story short, they increased the length of the airframe slightly in order to add two more seating rows.
This was likely done in order to make it more competitive with the Bombardier CS300, and to be honest, I’m not really sure that was necessary. I’m hardly an expert in the field of commercial aviation, but the 737-700 has always been the “sweet spot” when it comes to performance vs payload. It’s an extremely versatile aircraft and I have no doubt it’s success would have continued with the MAX 7 even with the CS300 competing for the same customers. But what do I know? I’m just an illustrator.
It’s always weird taking one of my existing templates and either stretching or shortening it. I spent many hours working on my 737 MAX 8 illustrations, and then spent a couple days updating my 737-900 – so yeah, 737’s with long fuselages have been burned into my brain pretty well over the past week. So when the time came to shorten up the 737-8 to make these templates, the stubby proportions of this shorter variant really caught me off guard.
It almost looked comical and wrong to me once I had it all laid out, and I had to triple check to make sure I had the dimensions accurate. The 737-7 MAX really is a stubby little airplane, which is exaggerated no doubt by those huge new LEAP engines.
Anyway, so that’s it for 737 templates for a while. I need to go back and finish out my A340 series next, and what comes after that is still a bit fuzzy to me. I was planning on doing the 727 (finally!), but I’ve been getting a lot more requests for some other aircraft which might need to come first.
Hey scott.
Just want to tell you your 737 MAX series rock. I would like it if you do the MAX 9. And I am looking forward to the A340 series. Just one thing. I would absolutely love it if you done the Concorde after the A340 series.