President Donald Trump on Wednesday took his first flight on a new Air Force One — a $400 million jumbo jet he solicited from the Qatari royal family that required hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded upgrades and which Trump plans to take with him when he leaves office.
Trump's First Flight on the New Aircraft
“I’m excited about the first flight. It’s something — nobody’s ever seen anything like it,” he told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in suburban Maryland as he prepared to climb aboard. Trump was, in fact, correct that no one has ever seen anything like it. Never before has a president asked a foreign country to give him a present of such magnitude. Legally, government officials are not permitted to solicit a gift from a foreign entity at all, although the U.S. Supreme Court famously gave the president broad immunity in a 2024 case stemming from Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.
Plans to Keep the Plane After Presidency
While the Defense Department said the plane was donated to the United States government, Trump intends to take the Boeing 747 with him when he leaves office. A video rendering of his presidential library he posted to social media in March shows a 747 in the lobby. Reports have pegged the modification costs — to install military and communications equipment — as high as $1 billion. Air Force officials on Wednesday told HuffPost the total cost was “classified.” Trump, asked how much the work cost, declined to say before explaining the process of how he asked for the jet.
How the Jet Was Acquired
“It cost very little relative to what it would cost if we did it a different way. So, this was a gift from a country that’s treated us very well, and they’re an ally of us over in the Middle East, Qatar. And I went to Boeing; I said who has the best one. They said Qatar, there’s never been a plane like it. Frankly, we couldn’t build a plane like this because we wouldn’t be willing to spend the kind of money necessary,” Trump said. “I went to Qatar; I said, I’d like to use it for a period of time because the other ones, as you know, are under construction, they’ll be here in two years and because the plane is 35 years old. So, I said I’d like to use it. And the emir, Tamim, who’s a great gentleman, he said, ‘No, no, I’d like to make a contribution to the country.’”
Background on Air Force One Replacement
The delay in replacing the existing Air Force One planes, a pair of 747s put into service under President George H.W. Bush, was caused by Trump, who claimed manufacturer Boeing was cheating the government on its replacement contract. To meet Trump’s demands, the Air Force in his first term instead purchased two finished but mothballed 747s from a defunct Russian airline only to learn that tearing down two airframes to install necessary modifications was far more costly than building the planes from scratch. Trump later bragged about the plane during his visit to North Dakota for the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt presidential library. “This is a very exciting thing for me, and number one, I have to tell you, because this was an inaugural flight of a certain airplane called Air Force One, after 37 years,” he said. “And it’s a great plane.”
