Trump Stops Using Luxurious But Defenseless Jet He Solicited From Qatar

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has at least temporarily abandoned using the luxury jumbo jet he solicited from Qatar, using instead a decades-old, purpose-built Air Force 747 in the iconic blue-and-white color scheme for his travel over the past two weeks.

Trump crowed about the newer plane, even showing off its interior decorations to reporters on its first flight as Air Force One, but has not explained why he stopped flying it in the middle of last month. The Qatari plane does not have the self-defense capabilities of the custom-built planes.

For his trip to the United Nations on Sept. 21-22; to Knoxville, Tennessee, on Sept. 26 to watch a college football game; to Chicago on Sept. 27 to watch a golf tournament; and to Dallas on Thursday for a rally in neighboring Oklahoma, Trump has taken the modified Boeing 747 with the tail number 29000 rather than the $150 million “gift” the Qatari royal family “gave” him after he asked.

And on Friday, Trump again is taking the 35-year-old jet whose condition and size he has bemoaned in the past, saying other world leaders had larger planes, to a rally in Mobile, Alabama.

Trump’s White House did not respond to multiple HuffPost queries about why the Qatari jet was not being flown — it was last used by Trump to attend a rally in North Carolina on Sept. 16 — even after one official said an explanation would be forthcoming.

The modified 747s put into service by the Air Force in the early 1990s have equipment behind each engine pod and at the tail to detect missiles and blind them with infrared laser pulses, among other self-defense mechanisms. The Qatari jet does not appear to have any of those defensive tools.

In response to a HuffPost question in July about why he was flying a plane that lacked defensive capabilities, Trump claimed that the Qatari jet would be removed from service the following month to be “maxxed out,” although he never elaborated on what that meant.

A Trump administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution, said the Qatari 747, which is officially referred to as a “bridge” aircraft, does not appear to have been removed from service for any such refurbishment.

Trump infamously took his new “gift” from Qatar to the NATO summit in Turkey — just a few hundred miles from the border with Iran, against which he launched a war on Feb. 28 — only to have to announce that he would use the older, real Air Force One instead for the trip home. Trump in the end snuck off that plane in a catering truck and flew on a different government jet from Turkey to Great Britain, where he switched to the Qatari jet for the final leg back to Washington.

Aviation expert Richard Aboulafia, with the AeroDynamic Advisory consulting group, said he can think of a whole host of reasons not to use the Qatari plane: “Safety, safety, safety, national security, safety, national security, and so on.”

Trump’s self-proclaimed expertise about aircraft, even before his decision to seek the Qatari plane, has cost Americans billions of extra dollars and has left the country with a less-secure follow-on Air Force One for the coming years.

Trump first took office in 2017 raging against Boeing for supposedly cheating the country by charging too much for replacement 747s in a contract finalized under the Obama administration. Trump’s insistence that $1 billion be cut led Air Force officials to buy existing 747-8s that had been ordered but abandoned by a bankrupt Russian airline and modify them for use as the new Air Force Ones.

That process, however, wound up costing much more than building the planes from scratch to the Air Force specifications. It also meant deleting a key feature: the ability to refuel in the air, which the current Air Force 747s, technically known as VC-25As, possess and which let them stay aloft for as long as food and water supplies permit.

The contract that Trump claimed would save money is now billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

Trump’s insistence on a larger plane — the Qatari 747-8 is 250 feet from nose to tail, 18 feet longer than the Air Force’s older-model 747-200s — has also cost taxpayers at least hundreds of millions of dollars to install communications and other equipment. Trump’s Department of Defense has deemed exact information about those costs “classified” — even though the contracts for the previous Air Force Ones were public records.

Trump has also said he plans to take the Qatari jet with him to his presidential library, although how that would be legal is unclear. Previous Air Force Ones, most notably the modified Boeing 707 on display at the Ronald Reagan Library in California, remain the property of the Air Force and are on loan to libraries and museums.