Ryanair has put on hold its ambitions of flying 200 million passengers annually because of extended delays to the delivery of a fleet of Boeing’s 737 Max planes, which may now arrive up to two years late.

The airline said it would press the US manufacturer to revise its huge order of 737 Max 200 models to include an even larger variant, the 230-seat 737 Max 10, once the troubled plane is approved and back in production.

Ryanair is one of the biggest customers for Boeing’s grounded plane, with a total of 210 on order. The Irish airline said it hopes to have its first 55 737 Max jets flying by the summer of 2021, a year later than originally planned, with 50 more planes to follow each year ready for the summer schedules.

However, the Ryanair chief executive, Michael O’Leary, said Boeing’s problems could ultimately delay the planes’ entry into service for the airline by two years.

O’Leary said: “What is likely is they will push out that delivery profile with Boeing by at least 12 months. At best that means we will have to roll forward our plans to fly 200 million passengers per year ... by at least 12 months, possibly 24.” That would result in Ryanair reaching its 200 million passenger target by March 2026 rather than March 2024.

Its chief financial officer, Neil Sorahan, when asked if there was any risk to its plans to take delivery of 55 planes by next summer, said: “I don’t believe so – but we have been disappointed before.”

However, analysts said that the delays to deliveries of the Max could have benefited Ryanair, as fewer seats in the European market helped push fares higher through the autumn and into the winter. The airline reported a profit after tax of €88m (£74m) for the three months to the end of December, the third quarter of its financial year, as average fares rose by 9% and ancillary revenues – from extras such as prebooked seating – went up by 21%.

“The performance was even stronger than we had forecast,” the Liberum analyst Gerald Khoo said. He believes the fact that Ryanair is unlikely to receive any 737 Max deliveries soon is “not necessarily a bad thing, with demand holding up for now and supply growth very constrained … Slower capacity growth should have positive implications for the demand/supply balance, and hence industry pricing.”

In January, Boeing said it did not expect the 737 Max, which was grounded after two fatal crashes, to return to service until mid-2020.

Ryanair, which does not take deliveries during its summer peak of June-August, said last week it did not expect to receive the first Max jets until September or October 2020. It will take a maximum of eight planes a month, or about 50 deliveries a year, O’Leary said.

Meanwhile, the airline will look to upgrade its order to receive a potentially even more efficient model than the 737 Max 200 plane, which O’Leary has long described as a “gamechanger” for its extra seats and lower fuel burn than his existing fleet. He said the airline was already in discussions with Boeing, with an offer on the table for new 737 Max 10s. However, he added: “To be fair to them, I don’t think the new management team is in a position to be able to talk to us about a new order. We understand that but we have an offer in and we expect to be at the head of the queue.”

The 737 Max was grounded in March after 346 people died in two crashes attributed to the plane’s anti-stall software.

Ryanair’s third-quarter results came weeks after the group raised its profit forecast to between €950m and €1.05bn for the year after a strong Christmas period.