President Donald Trump was clearly pissed off. He had just seen something he wanted very badly but could not seem to get anyone to deliver.
It was Saturday, February 15, and he was on one of his frequent weekend commutes from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. Air Force One had just parked at its secure ramp in a part of Palm Beach International Airport distant from the commercial passenger terminal and close to the area used by corporate and private jets, of which there are many in this canton of concentrated wealth.
The presidential motorcade came to a stop next to a jet larger and sleeker than Air Force One, and Trump went aboard to take a look. It was the first time he was able to see up close the size and sophistication of the final, ultimate version of the iconic Boeing jumbo, the 747-8, long promised to replace the current Air Force One, a nearly 35-year-old 747-200 jet—a model that Boeing stopped making in 1991 and most airlines ceased using decades ago.
An aging jet is costly. The Guardian has reported that flying Trump and his entourage to Palm Beach for his golfing weekends in the sun costs approximately a million bucks a trip. The jumbo was designed optimally for transoceanic flights of about eight hours, not two-hour hops that are, in terms of gas consumption, the least efficient use of the machine. Moreover, such frequent use of an airplane this old requires intense maintenance, particularly for the engines. Although the 747-8 is a larger airplane, its engines are at least 30% more efficient and far less polluting.
Trump’s frustration with Boeing’s failure to deliver the two new 747-8 jets peaked at this moment. It was a fiasco he had been dealing with since his first term, and delivery has now slipped back, at best, from 2024 to the last year of his current term. The two jets had been sucked into the wider contagion of seemingly endemic Boeing mismanagement.
The 747-8 parked at Palm Beach had once been owned by the Qatari royal family. According to registration data, it is now operated by Global Jet, a company that brokers the sale of VIP-level jets and also arranges charter flights. When it was serving the Qatari royals, the aesthetic of its interior decor was worthy of Trump Tower—the common machine was embellished with an exotic opulence. A space that in an airline version can accommodate 467 passengers was tailored for just 89, with 10 bathrooms. What Trump would have most noticed is that the upper deck, the prime space, was more than twice the length of that of the current Air Force One. Another advance, not apparent when parked, is that the ride in the airplane is a lot quieter, thanks to those far more refined engines.
A few days later, while venting to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump complained, “It’s taking Boeing too long,” saying, “We may go buy a plane” and then “convert it.” That made no sense because that is, in effect, what Boeing is already doing. The company took two jumbos ordered by a Russian airline that went bankrupt and is converting them to meet the prescribed and demanding special standards for Air Force One.
Outwardly, and in ways that appeal to all presidents, not just Trump, Air Force One is far more than just a very large machine. It represents the prestige and power of the United States as well as of the president himself, and—at least in the days of Boeing’s peerless world status—America’s technical mastery. (The original 747 ushered in the age of affordable global air travel, something new in the human experience.) It also provides creature comforts and an ease of passage on long flights for often highly stressed staffers. It’s easy enough to fulfill that role, and if that was all that was required of Boeing the two new jets might have been delivered in Trump’s first term. The more salient but unaddressed question is about the highly classified special security standards that also have to be met and whether these jets are, in fact, being built for a mission that no longer exists.
The original mission specifications reflected the mindset of the Dr. Strangelove era, of the Cold War and the doomsday scenario where, according to the doctrine of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, the ultimate risk was a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States in which the major populations of both would be simultaneously incinerated.
Before catastrophe could occur, if sufficiently forewarned, the idea is that the commander in chief and his staff would be able to switch from Air Force One to one of four 747s specifically equipped to serve as a flying command and control center, designed to survive a nuclear electromagnetic pulse, kept at readiness at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. (While that system remains in place, the survival of the rest of the earthbound political elite is in jeopardy since a massive bunker, large enough to hold all members of Congress, built beneath the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, has long since been discarded.)
The first Boeing jet to fulfill the role of Air Force One was a converted 707, a much smaller single-aisle precursor to the 747, used by President John F. Kennedy (who also had a bunker, known as the Detachment Hotel, on Peanut Island, near the Kennedy family compound at Palm Beach).
The comedic qualities of the bunker mentality, both subterranean and airborne, have long since replaced that fevered 1960s mindset. (The closest the world came to a nuclear doomsday was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962). Any remnants of that mentality that survive in the carapace of Air Force One are highly classified. But the basics involve two discrete technologies: defense in flight against weapons fired at the airplane, and hardened communications systems to thwart jamming and, a more recent threat, cyber attacks.
Underlying the first threat, of a missile attack, is the assumption that Air Force One would fly into a war zone, or be targeted closer to home by terrorists who would be limited to crude and conspicuous hand-held launchers. The first is highly improbable. The technology of a warzone is changing rapidly. In only three years, the technology of the Ukraine battlefield has gone from the trenches and artillery of the First World War to a point where the most lethal weapons used by both sides are mass-produced drones, and a jumbo jet would be simple roadkill for a drone. As for the second, of a dedicated terrorist attack, that’s a remote risk for which countermeasures are based on intelligence and the live surveillance of runway perimeters.
Trump has now reportedly directed his own Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk (he has the same reflexive fascist salute), to interrogate the problem and fix it. Musk should consider this: One world power has clearly assessed these same risks and left behind the doomsday doctrine.
President Xi Jinping of China calmly girdles the earth in an airplane that began its life similarly to that of the two being converted by Boeing, a 747-8 purchased by Air China (its branding still prominent along the fuselage) and then adapted by Chinese technicians who hardened the communications systems, and by a German company that does bespoke VIP upgrades to provide the creature comforts demanded by many corporate titans for their own jets.
If it’s a contest simply of size, as it often is for Trump—of jumbo envy—theirs is bigger than ours. Quite a bit bigger.
