Why Trump Wants A New Air Force One

It has long been known that Donald Trump does not like his official plane. Even back in 2015, during the campaign leading to his first presidency, he was dissing Air Force One as he compared it to his personal plane to a <Rolling Stones> journalist. “It’s bigger than Air Force One,” he told the journalist, referring to his 757 that he bought from Microsoft mogul Paul Allen and which, refitted with plenty of gold plating and Trump family crests, had been dubbed Trump Force One – “which is a step down from this in every way. Rolls-Royce engines; seats 43. Didja know it was featured on the Discovery Channel as the world’s most luxurious jetliner?”

It is another matter that his 757 isn’t larger than Air Force One, and that it wasn’t on Discovery Channel, but on the Smithsonian Channel. But his grouse of Air Force One – which he was going to have to use once his first term began, and which he is still stuck with in his second – does have some legitimate grounds. The two 747-200 planes that serve as Air Force One, for all its pomp and splendour, are over 30 years old. Plans to acquire two new presidential planes began as way back as George W Bush’s second term. Since then, the orders for new planes have witnessed repeated delays. Even at the earliest, it is estimated, that the planes won’t arrive before Trump leaves office.

Unsurprisingly, when Qatar floated the idea of gifting Trump a Boeing 747-8, known as a ‘palace in the sky’, which is said to be worth $400 million, despite the protests domestically, the president seemed very keen. “I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer,” Trump responded. “I mean, I could be a stupid person say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane’.”

Trump may try to spin the gift, as one more instance of his deal-making savvy, but his readiness to accept it has hit him with an avalanche of bad press and protests back home. It has been trailing him ever since his return from his highly-publicised visit to the Gulf countries of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE.

Accepting such a gift, national security experts have cautioned, far from it being a cost-saving measure, would turn out to be quite costly, since there would be extensive modifications required, from tearing out its interiors to check for espionage devices to modifying it for countermeasures against nuclear and missile threats, to make it fit to serve as Air Force One. The plane might come free, but the modifications could set back the US coffers, it is said, by over $1 billion.

And then there is the ethical quagmire of accepting such a gift. Some Democrats have already raised concerns that it would violate the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prohibits federal officials from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval. And many media outlets have been pointing to the many conflicts of interest accepting such a gift would raise. Whether this will matter much, given Trump’s private company already has several projects in this region, including a planned golf course in Qatar, is anybody’s guess.

Trump has however been lashing out to these protests, defending the proposal as a gift, not to him personally, but to the US government’s Defense Department. “You should be embarrassed asking that question,” he told an ABC News reporter who pressed him on this issue. “They’re giving us a free jet. I could say, ‘No, no, no, don’t give us. I want to pay you a billion or $400 million, or whatever it is.’ Or I could say, ‘Thank you very much.’”

Amusingly, while the aircraft is indeed plush – its customised interiors, said to have cost tens of millions of dollars, includes sycamore and wacapou wood finishes, silk fabrics and space for 89 passengers in a configuration that includes two bedrooms and entertainment and meeting rooms – it has actually been put up for sale since 2020, and hasn’t found any buyer yet.
The Qataris do have a bit of history of making gifts of items it cannot sell. It gifted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan one such luxury jet, a Boeing 747-8i, which it had put out in the market back in 2018.

The aircraft it plans to gift Trump is one that was commissioned for Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, Qatar’s former prime minister. An aviation blog (One Mile at a Time) has estimated that the aircraft has flown 1,069 hours in the eight years before it was put up for sale in 2020, averaging about two hours per week. So why would a perfectly good and underused aircraft, in fact a luxurious one, not find a buyer for over five years? This might have something to do with the rapidly growing maintenance costs of 747s. Globally, the fleet of 747s is shrinking, with the rise of newer and more fuel-efficient aircrafts, and the number of mechanics who know how to work on them have also been reducing.

While Trump does want a new 747 badly, it seems the Qataris too are in a bit of a rush to get rid of one.

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