President Trump said Wednesday he will fly from Turkey to Britain on an older Air Force One aircraft instead of the new Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar, a switch that puts fresh attention on the retrofitted jet he introduced just weeks earlier as his future presidential plane.
The decision comes after months of scrutiny over the luxury aircraft, which was meant to serve as a temporary stand-in while Boeing works through years of delays on the next generation of Air Force One planes. Critics have raised questions about the cost of retrofitting the Qatari jet, the security risks tied to rushing it into service, and the speed at which the conversion was completed.
Trump explained the switch on Truth Social, saying he would fly the older aircraft “for old time’s sake” on the trip to RAF Mildenhall in Britain. The new plane will visit the same base separately so U.S. service members stationed there can tour it.
The Qatari jet has faced scrutiny since Trump accepted it as a gift. Turning the aircraft into a functioning Air Force One required a range of security upgrades, according to experts who have tracked the process. Engineers had to install communications systems designed to prevent eavesdropping and add missile defense capabilities, work that typically takes years on a presidential aircraft.
Democratic lawmakers have put the cost of the conversion at more than $1 billion and warned about the security implications of accepting a foreign government’s jet for presidential use. Some experts have also raised concerns that the speed of the retrofit could mean the plane falls short of the protections built into the current Air Force One fleet. The upgrades moved quickly enough that questions remain about whether every standard safeguard was fully implemented before the aircraft entered service.
A second aircraft capable of serving as Air Force One travels on standby during presidential trips, a longstanding practice regardless of which primary plane is in use.
The Air Force pushed to get the Qatari jet ready on an accelerated timeline, and that effort meant skipping some modifications originally planned for the next-generation presidential aircraft. Officials chose to deliver an interim version sooner rather than wait for every feature envisioned in the original design.
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink has defended the process, saying the service “meticulously evaluated every requirement” while working to speed up delivery. Officials maintain the aircraft still meets the standards expected of a presidential plane, even with the faster timeline.
The Qatari jet is functioning as a bridge aircraft while Boeing continues work on two purpose-built 747-8s under a $3.9 billion fixed-price contract the company signed in 2018. That program has fallen four years behind its original schedule, and delivery of the finished planes isn’t expected until mid-2028.
The delay raises the possibility that Trump could finish his term without ever flying on a new, U.S.-built Air Force One. His term ends in January 2029, less than a year after Boeing’s revised delivery target.
Costs on the Boeing program have climbed as the delays have stretched on. The company’s total costs now exceed $5 billion, and Boeing has booked billions of dollars in charges tied to the project as it works to bring the planes to completion.
The gap between the contract’s original price and the program’s actual costs illustrates how far the effort has strayed from its initial terms. Boeing agreed to the fixed-price structure in 2018 under different leadership and different production timelines, and the company has absorbed much of the financial fallout from the delays rather than passing the added costs on to the government.
For now, the Qatari jet remains available to Trump even as he opts for the older aircraft on this particular trip. The choice to use the older plane for the Britain flight doesn’t signal that the Qatari jet is being sidelined, based on Trump’s own framing of the decision as a one-off nod to the past rather than a shift away from the new aircraft.
The dynamic underscores the unusual position the administration finds itself in: operating a foreign-donated aircraft as a stopgap while the domestically built replacement remains years away, all while facing continued questions from lawmakers about the wisdom of accepting the gift in the first place.
Whether the scrutiny over the Qatari jet’s security upgrades leads to further changes in how the aircraft is used remains to be seen. Officials have stood by the retrofit process so far, and there’s no indication the administration plans to slow down its use of the aircraft going forward.
The broader question of when Trump will have a purpose-built American aircraft at his disposal still hinges on Boeing’s ability to hit its 2028 target, a deadline the company has already missed once. Given the program’s history of delays, further slippage would extend the period in which the administration relies on either the older Air Force One fleet or the Qatari-donated jet to fulfill presidential travel needs.
