THIS is a report again exposing the narcissism, greed, corruption, and ignorance of the drippings NOT MY president donnie jessica drumpf/trump. From the New York Times
Inside the Rushed Effort to Get Trump His New Air Force One
A New York Times investigation found that President Trump’s push to speed delivery of the aircraft led to ballooning costs and trade-offs in safety features.
Eric Lipton is an investigative reporter. Tyler Pager and Maggie Haberman cover the White House.
President Trump was entranced. It was a few weeks into his second term, and he was on the tarmac of the Palm Beach airport, getting a tour of a luxury Boeing 747-8 that had been flown from Doha for his perusal.
The double-decker jet, which had been outfitted for the Qatari royal family, had a spacious bedroom adorned with leather and wood and a lounge featuring a chandelier and another with suede seats.
Two planes being built by Boeing to replace the aging Air Force One fleet were years behind schedule, and Mr. Trump’s team had asked the Air Force to find a temporary aircraft. This was the one, the president decided.
Mr. Trump’s February 2025 tour of the Qatari jet led to a frantic sprint inside the White House and the Pentagon. The administration sought to upgrade the plane in time to meet his demand for it to be ready by the nation’s 250th birthday this summer, with an accelerated retrofit.
An investigation by The New York Times found that the president’s push to get the luxury aircraft quickly led to ballooning costs and trade-offs in safety features that potentially left Mr. Trump and others who travel with him on Air Force One vulnerable.
Among the findings:
Mr. Trump was personally engaged in making decisions about the retrofitting of the donated plane, giving the final approval on the features and security measures that would be included, according to people familiar with his role. They and others interviewed for this article described the sensitive information about the process and the plane on the condition of anonymity.
Several key security and safety features on the Boeing planes that have been used for decades as Air Force One are not visible on the upgraded jet, including a lower-level exit for high-risk situations, additional backup power capacity and an advanced antimissile system, public Air Force records and photographs examined by The Times show. The planes currently being built to serve as the permanent presidential fleet are all set to have such features, federal records show.
The 747-8 plane was overhauled on a compressed timeline of just about eight months. Experts said the jet would have needed several years for a full upgrade.
Because the Qatari jet was being pushed into service so quickly, some White House officials initially expected it would only be used for domestic travel or to visit allied countries with U.S. military bases.
The government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase equipment needed to train pilots to fly the 747-8 plane so quickly, on top of the approximately $400 million cost of the upgrades that the administration has publicly acknowledged. The Pentagon has tried to mask the total price tag — including from Congress — by taking the funds from a classified budget for nuclear modernization.
The truncated overhaul of the jet came after Qatar agreed to give it to the Defense Department as a gift. It is eventually slated to go to Mr. Trump’s presidential library, an unorthodox donation that has been criticized as a way for the Middle Eastern country to curry favor with the president.
The security trade-offs of the new Air Force One burst into public view when Mr. Trump was forced to fly out of Turkey earlier this month on a different jet, a swap made at the urging of the Secret Service after officials identified a credible threat to him by Iranian proxy forces. The New York Times then reported that the new plane lacks some of the same defensive countermeasures as the previous model.
It is unclear what security measures, including new air-defense technologies, may have been incorporated onto the plane, which the administration has maintained is safe. Nevertheless, the White House announced this week that the Qatari-donated jet would be taken out of service this fall for unspecified “upgrades and enhancements.”
“PLANEMAXXING,” the White House declared in a social media post touting the move.
The reversal exposes the potential risks that the government took to satisfy Mr. Trump’s demand for an aircraft befitting the grandeur he believes should accompany his office. Experts familiar with the Air Force One program said they were surprised Mr. Trump had decided to use the Qatari-donated plane for overseas trips.
“People need to be aware it has a lot of shortfalls compared to Air Force One; they do add a measure of risk,” said Frank Kendall, who supervised the presidential plane modernization project, first as the Pentagon acquisition chief and then the Air Force secretary under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. from 2021 until January 2025.
But for Mr. Trump, having to use decades-old planes that frequently needed repairs was an embarrassment. The two 747 jets had been in service since the early 1990s, when the first of them carried President George H.W. Bush from Washington, D.C., to Topeka, Kansas.
“When you land and you see Saudi Arabia, and you see U.A.E., and you see Qatar and you see all these — and they have these brand-new Boeing 747s mostly, and you see ours next to it, this is like a totally different plane,” Mr. Trump told Sean Hannity during an interview on a flight to the Middle East in May 2025. He added: “And we’re the United States of America. I believe that we should have the most impressive plane.”
Air Force officials have said the rapid retrofitting of the Qatari plane was a success, describing it as safe, secure and equipped with the most advanced technologies.
“A testament to the Air Force’s ability to innovate and rapidly evolve to ensure the continuity of our government under any conditions,” Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach, the Air Force’s chief of staff, said in a statement in May.
The White House has also maintained that the Qatari jet poses no risk for the president and his entourage. In a statement this week, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, called the new plane “fully mission-ready and safe for presidential travel today.” She said the enhancements it was set to receive this fall would “ensure it remains the most advanced, secure and capable aircraft in the world.”
Fixated on Air Force One
It was December 2016, shortly after Mr. Trump’s first election, and he was being briefed on the lengths that the military goes to harden Air Force One.
In a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Air Force Gen. Carlton D. Everhart II told the incoming president about the “complex and unique systems” required of the Boeing planes “to ensure survivability and reliability,” according to a copy of a once-secret presentation, reported on earlier by TWZ, a website that covers the Pentagon.
General Everhart described how Air Force One served as a mobile command center for President George W. Bush during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Mr. Everhart, who is now retired, said in an interview that Mr. Trump asked about the plans for a modernized Air Force One, expressing confidence about his own expertise.
“I know about my airplane, because I fly all the time,” Mr. Trump told him, as Mr. Everhart recalled, referring to his private plane informally called Trump Force One.
Mr. Trump remained fixated on Air Force One when he regained the White House. Just weeks after his re-election in 2024, Mr. Trump sent the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk to a Boeing airplane hangar in Texas where the two jets were slowly being transformed.
Mr. Musk’s assignment was to find a way to speed up the Boeing effort, as he and others believed the project had gotten bogged down by excessively strict security clearance requirements for some of the workers not involved in sensitive features of the plane.
But the Trump transition team also asked the Air Force for a backup plan, according to former and current Air Force officials: to scour Boeing’s list of all 747-8 airplanes in service to see if there was another in the world that could be quickly procured for Mr. Trump.
Military officials were already concerned about the number of repairs needed for the aging planes in the presidential fleet. The 747-8, the latest model of the Boeing jet, is different from the one that had been used for decades as Air Force One. It has modernized electronic flight controls, a redesigned wing system and engines and a larger cabin and upper deck, among other changes. The Air Force limited the choice to this plane because it has four engines, providing an extra margin of safety if one failed.
But even after locating the Qatari jet, the Air Force knew that it would cost more than $1 billion and take years to install the same features as the planes built to serve as Air Force One, according to Mr. Kendall and other former Air Force officials.
Some of the security features on the old Air Force One
Multiple self-defense systems, including infrared countermeasure devices
A lower entryway to allow exit and entry in less secure environments
Two auxiliary power units to ensure power for the plane
Pentagon documents show that those Boeing jets must undergo a series of major structural changes to be part of the presidential fleet. Holes must be carefully cut into the fuselage to build a lower entryway, allowing the president to exit and enter in less secure environments. An “autonomous baggage loading” system has to be added to reduce the reliance on foreign ground crews.
Hundreds of miles of electrical wiring and electronic components have to be shielded from an electromagnetic pulse, such as from a nuclear weapon detonation.
The official planes also require a second small engine — known as an auxiliary power unit — to be installed near the rear of the jet to serve as a backup for communication systems and other vital electronics gear. They also need some of the most advanced communications equipment and what the Pentagon has called a “self-defense system.”
All the upgrades are “inherently expensive,” one Air Force briefing said, outstripping the roughly $400 million the military initially estimated it would cost just for the two jets.
The latest total estimate: $5.1 billion for the entire modernization effort, now slated to be completed in 2028 — 13 years after the Air Force first decided to rely on 747-8 jets for the project.
A Push for Speed
Over a series of meetings last year, military officials presented him with printouts outlining the various modifications. The president weighed in on choices for the interior décor and exterior paint color and signed off on the security features and communication systems, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Mr. Trump also made it very clear: He wanted the plane in time for America’s 250th birthday, on July 4, 2026.
Early on, White House officials had expected the upgrades would take 18 to 24 months. Once the timeline was truncated, some officials believed Mr. Trump would only use the retrofitted Qatari jet for domestic travel or to allied countries in safe regions.
By the time the Air Force got ownership of the plane in August, it had less than a year.
On Aug. 8, the 747-8 lifted off from Fort Worth, Texas, where it had been stored for months, and landed in Waco, the home of a sprawling complex owned by L3Harris, a military contractor selected to retrofit the Qatari plane. The terms of the contract and the total price have not been made public.
Executives at L3Harris said that even before starting major work on the plane, it was searched for any listening devices or other electronics that might have been installed before the United States took possession of it.
It was “a very rigorous process, really in advance of us even working on it,” said Jason Lambert, the president of L3Harris’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance division, in a June interview with Breaking Defense, an industry trade publication. He added that the process was “performed by our electronic warfare experts in conjunction with the U.S. government’s leaders in cybersecurity to fully inspect and ensure that everything within that aircraft was safe for the mission.”
The company assigned as many as 400 employees, working around the clock over three shifts, to supercharge the effort.
A top priority: adding a secure communications system so the plane could serve as a global command center.
But from the start, it was clear there would be some limits on what they could do, Mr. Lambert told Breaking Defense. The interior of the plane would get the presidential seal and new wood and leather furnishings, he said. But major adjustments such as moving bulkheads or fixed structures inside the aircraft were not doable.
No comments:
Post a Comment