Microsoft's Fly!

The shortest representative of the new incarnation of the narrow-body Boeing family - 737 MAX 7 - performed its first flight on March 16.
The project is developing according to the schedule, and from this day the flying part of the certification program was launched, which should be completed by obtaining permits and deliveries in 2019.

The plane landed at 10:17 local time (US Pacific Time Zone, 21:17 Moscow time) from the airfield in Renton (RNT), Washington, and landed at 3:00 05 minutes at the Boeing airfield in Seattle (BFI) .
Managed the flight test pilots (Test and Evaluation Captains) Boeing Jim Webb (Jim Webb) and Keith Otsuka (Keith Otsuka).

Shortened hit sales

Boeing 737 MAX 7 in its history before the actual incarnation has experienced a "rebirth". Initially conceived as a re-engineered version of the Boeing 737-700 aircraft, he met a stream of criticism for his weak economic performance. Therefore, the manufacturer changed the project - at that time the next version in order to avoid confusion called MAX 7X - and created a larger airplane, truncating the most popular modification of the family, MAX 8, by four meters.
"Seven" got a saloon with a maximum capacity of up to 172 passengers (or 126 when arranging seats with a standard pitch) and engines CFM International LEAP-1B25 with a reduction in comparison with -1B28 on the "eight" and "nine" traction.

... which turned out to be too unpopular

However, even in this configuration, the aircraft proved to be extremely unpopular, which is especially evident against the backdrop of the giant sales of its predecessor and the generally record-breaking 737 MAX family as a whole. If the Boeing 737-700 was removed from production in the amount of 1,126 units, then for MAX 7 the manufacturer received only three orders totaling 58 cars. While all four representatives of MAX (7, 8, 9 and 10) are sold in quantity of 4,063 pieces.

The new aircraft was bought by two of Boeing's most loyal customers with a huge fleet of cars of the same family - American Southwest Airlines (WN; 30 units) and Canadian WestJet (WS; 23 pieces). Another five aircraft signed an agreement of intent with the founders of the startup Canada Jetlines, which should begin operations in a year.

And if the relatively weak demand for Canadian routes makes MAX 7 a balanced choice for WestJet, then the only reason the "seven" was interesting to Southwest was the poor performance of MAX 8 in two US second-tier airports - Midway (MDW), located only 13 kilometers from the Chicago business center, and Hollywood Burbank (BUR) in Los Angeles County, California, adjacent to North Hollywood. Only here in the conditions of urban development on the runways less than two thousand meters long (in Burbank - 2,099 m), the basic model of Boeing is not capable of taking off with its typical load.
Therefore, Southwest, earning on the traffic of these airports, need airplanes that can break away from the ground faster.
The problem with the Boeing 737 MAX 7 is that there are almost no such cases in the world.