I have a 2016 Volkswagen Golf. It’s garaged and well-maintained. I keep the inside spotless. People comment that it looks like a new car. It’s nine years old but only has 30,000 miles on it. It’s had a soft life so it should still look good. Put a pin in this.
The venerable Boeing B-52 bomber was designed long before I was born. It was deployed to the Air Force in 1952. The last B-52 rolled off the production line in 1962, 63 years ago. The Air Force currently operates a fleet of 76 B-52s. They’ve been flying for 73 years as one leg of our nuclear defense triad. That’s pretty amazing! Even more amazing is that the Air Force announced its intent earlier this year to keep the B-52s in the air until at least 2060! By then it would be well over a century old, with hundreds of thousands of flight hours. Let’s put a pin in this too.
During Donald Trump’s first term he complained that Air Force One was a relic and needed to be replaced, saying that the prestige of the United States in foreign eyes was at stake even though almost all foreign leaders are flown around on smaller, more modest conventional passenger aircraft like the A330 and A350. I’ll stifle my opinion about what smears our international prestige more, the plane or its passenger. And which deserved to be replaced first.
Air Force One is actually two planes which are flown round-robin. Both are 747-200Bs with tail numbers 28000 and 29000, respectively. Both entered service in 1990. Trump has a point. They were thirty year-old planes in 2020. On Trump’s order, the Air Force ordered two new 747-8s in 2018 with delivery promised by 2024. COVID, supply chain disruptions. Boeing’s management screwups and Trump’s mostly cosmetic change orders and inability to close a deal pushed back delivery until 2026, then 2028 and possibly even 2029. Trump might not even have the chance to christen it, or even install gold-plated toilet bowls in the presidential loo.
Shortly after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, Trump contacted Boeing about when he could expect delivery of the new Air Force One(s) and was told that it would be at least two years. That wasn’t good enough for him. He dispatched his envoy Steve Witkoff to find him a used 747 to buy in the Middle East, where Arab royal families ostentatiously flout their immense oil wealth with 500 foot yachts, 400-vehicle garages full of rare supercars and massively oversized private jets as large as the A380. Surely, one of them would like to sell or lease us one of their 747s.
Big surprise! The Qatari royal family offered instead to give Trump one of its 747s worth $400 million! That was the story anyway.
Trump has repeatedly referred to it as a “gesture” or “contribution” from Qatar’s royal family. A “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE,”. Curiously, Qatar had flown that plane to Palm Beach airport in February 2025, only a couple of weeks after Trump’s inauguration and three months before this became a story, for Trump to inspect while he was at Mar A Lago. This plane wasn’t a surprise gift at all. It’s a well-orchestrated grift.
The original deal was, as Trump himself described it, Qatar would give him the plane for use while he was POTUS and then its ownership would revert to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Museum when he left office. Trump was evasive about to whom the plane would actually be given but its transfer to his currently nonexistent presidential museum when he left office made it clear that he, not the Air Force, would be the recipient of Qatar’s largess. Since that presidential museum would be another one of Trump’s hundreds of tawdry LLCs it meant that he would ultimately have control over the plane. Others would pay for its upkeep. For a vanilla 747, that’s about $25,000/hour.
The second problem is that neither people nor organizations nor states give each other gifts this extravagant unless they’re expecting quid pro quo… something in return. When even the right wing media was exploding with headlines about it being an illegal emolument under the US Constitution, Trump took a step back and said that it was a gift to the US Air Force. But if it was a gift the US Air Force why would it want to surrender its freshly-refurbished plane to the Trump museum in 2029? Congress has the ultimate decision over which military assets will be sold, given or auctioned off to third parties.
There are so many things wrong with this story that it’s difficult to know where to begin. All bear the same Trump stench of corruption, lies and self-dealing which have been synonymous with Trump’s business “style” since the 1970s. Let’s start with:
1. It’s expressly illegal in the US Constitution for the president to receive gifts from foreign heads of state. Here’s the text from Article 1, Section 9:
...no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
Trump has never shown interest in complying with this constitutional restraint on his profiteering from the office but the illegality of this “gift” was practically custom-written 238 years ago for this exact circumstance.
2. This is a “free plane” like being given a tenement tear-down in midtown is a “free hotel”.
Air Force One isn’t a passenger jet. It’s a hybrid flying White House. The secure communications and military command/control equipment on Air Force One reportedly costs well over a hundred million dollars. Every wire and cable on the plane would have to be shielded from EMP radiation, bearing in mind that a production 747 has 140 miles of wiring. That doesn’t count the top secret add ons. It has a beefed-up landing gear to allow emergency landings at unimproved air fields and on-board air stairs. It has a missile defense system and passive threat recognition system. It supports mid-air refueling. It has an on-board hospital, a surgical suite and two full-service galleys. It carries enough supplies to feed, house and clothe a few dozen passengers for weeks, from pilots to engineers to Secret Service to the presidential party. Air Force One is designed to remain aloft continuously for days following a nuclear exchange.
There are no hard numbers for this upgrade because much of it is top secret but experts pin the upgrade number at around one billion dollars, which would be borne by the taxpayers, not by Trump, not by his Trump Museum. That will buy the few short months that this plane would actually fly because the upgrade process will take at least two years. The plane has to be stripped to its bones to verify its airworthiness and to look for metal fatigue, listening devices, trackers and other hacks secretly hidden in the jet by the intelligence services of friend and foe alike.
But wait, there’s more! Taxpayers would have to pay to have it done all over again when Trump leaves office and flies back to Mara Lardo with his super-sophisticated private plane. Then a new AIr Force One would be needed. In fact, two Air Force Ones. We would have to pay three times because, as mentioned earlier, Air Force One is actually two identical 747s. That second plane is also missing in Trump’s “deal”.
3. The endless refrain from the White House has been that the current Air Force One is a museum piece, the implication being that it has reached the end of its safe flying life. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Some industry facts: there are 426 Boeing 747s still flying today with an average of 60,000 to 70,000 flight hours each. Boeing says that a 747 has a projected life span of 90,000 hours. There are 33 747s in regular service today with more than 100,000 hours and flown by carriers like Asiana, Atlas and even Lufthansa.
What about Air Force One? Surely the most iconic 747 in the world must be nearing the end of its life. This is what defense magazine, twz.com, learned in response to its FOIA request in 2015 and which has since been verbally updated by the Air Force in 2022:
Beyond all this, we do now know that the two VC-25As, which are often referred to by the tail numbers 28000 and 29000, had accumulated at least 9,000 and 8,421 total flight hours, respectively, by the end of 2015. The Air Force could tell us that these figures had risen to 10,030 hours for tail number 28000 and 9,899 hours for tail number 29000 by January 22 of this year. This is an average of around almost 172 hours and just over 246 hours per year across that period for these respective aircraft.
Er, what? Each of the Air Force Ones has only 10,000 flight hours? The average commercial airliner today flies 3 to 4 thousand hours per year, which makes Air Force One much like my 2016 VW. It’s barely broken in!
Sure, modern commercial aircraft have lighter air frames and quieter, more powerful and more fuel efficient engines. But these two Air Force Ones fly less than 250 hours per year each! How many billions of dollars is that fuel efficiency worth?
Let’s bear in mind that these two 747s are also the most pampered and well-serviced 747s in the sky. There’s an entire wing of the Air Force dedicated 24/7 to keeping them and a few lesser aircraft in top condition with hands-on help from Boeing engineers and technicians.
Why are we even talking about Air Force One replacement like it’s a burning national issue? Yes, new parts supplies are dwindling but 747 bone yards are also growing. Non-critical parts can be scrounged from decommissioned aircraft. Critical parts can be custom made. New engines can be fabricated or modified, if needed, certainly for much less than the billions it will cost to replace these aircraft. That nobody in Trump’s mighty DOGE suggested this option demonstrates what a fraud this pseudo-agency is.
Can the Air Force squeeze another five, ten, twenty or more years out of the existing Air Force One? Judging by the B-52, of course it can. Both are Boeing aircraft. B-52s regularly fly missions carrying nuclear weapons over heartland America with a fairly blemish-free record. It can certainly transport Trump’s fat ass to his 367th golf vacation at Mar A Lago without concerns.
Here’s the bottom line, at least as I see it: Trump has an aging Boeing 757. 757s are being pulled out of service for the same reason as 747s. Trump wants to retire with the most impressive private plane in the world to offset his shrinking manhood. But of course he doesn’t want to pay of it. Other Peoples’ Money is the foundation of Trump’s business “philosophy”. He wants taxpayers to give him a new private plane and upgrade it with the best of everything and then have Trump museum donors maintain it tax-free in perpetuity while he flies around like an Arab prince.
Tell the greedy bastard to go fuck himself.
