President Trump was entranced. It was a few weeks into his second term, and he was on the tarmac of the Palm Beach airport, getting a tour of a luxury Boeing 747-8 that had been flown from Doha for his perusal.
The double-decker jet, which had been outfitted for the Qatari royal family, had a spacious bedroom adorned with leather and wood and a lounge featuring a chandelier and another with suede seats.
Two planes being built by Boeing to replace the aging Air Force One fleet were years behind schedule, and Mr. Trump’s team had asked the Air Force to find a temporary aircraft. This was the one, the president decided.
Mr. Trump’s February 2025 tour of the Qatari jet led to a frantic sprint inside the White House and the Pentagon. The administration sought to upgrade the plane in time to meet his demand for it to be ready by the nation’s 250th birthday this summer, with an accelerated retrofit.
An investigation by The New York Times found that the president’s push to get the luxury aircraft quickly led to ballooning costs and trade-offs in safety features that potentially left Mr. Trump and others who travel with him on Air Force One vulnerable.
Among the findings:
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Mr. Trump was personally engaged in making decisions about the retrofitting of the donated plane, giving the final approval on the features and security measures that would be included, according to people familiar with his role. They and others interviewed for this article described the sensitive information about the process and the plane on the condition of anonymity.
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Several key security and safety features on the Boeing planes that have been used for decades as Air Force One are not visible on the upgraded jet, including a lower-level exit for high-risk situations, additional backup power capacity and an advanced antimissile system, public Air Force records and photographs examined by The Times show. The planes currently being built to serve as the permanent presidential fleet are all set to have such features, federal records show.
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The 747-8 plane was overhauled on a compressed timeline of just about eight months. Experts said the jet would have needed several years for a full upgrade.
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Because the Qatari jet was being pushed into service so quickly, some White House officials initially expected it would only be used for domestic travel or to visit allied countries with U.S. military bases.
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The government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase equipment needed to train pilots to fly the 747-8 plane so quickly, on top of the approximately $400 million cost of the upgrades that the administration has publicly acknowledged. The Pentagon has tried to mask the total price tag — including from Congress — by taking the funds from a classified budget for nuclear modernization.
The truncated overhaul of the jet came after Qatar agreed to give it to the Defense Department as a gift. It is eventually slated to go to Mr. Trump’s presidential library, an unorthodox donation that has been criticized as a way for the Middle Eastern country to curry favor with the president.
The security trade-offs of the new Air Force One burst into public view when Mr. Trump was forced to fly out of Turkey earlier this month on a different jet, a swap made at the urging of the Secret Service after officials identified a credible threat to him by Iranian proxy forces. The New York Times then reported that the new plane lacks some of the same defensive countermeasures as the previous model.
It is unclear what security measures, including new air-defense technologies, may have been incorporated onto the plane, which the administration has maintained is safe. Nevertheless, the White House announced this week that the Qatari-donated jet would be taken out of service this fall for unspecified “upgrades and enhancements.”
“PLANEMAXXING,” the White House declared in a social media post touting the move.
The reversal exposes the potential risks that the government took to satisfy Mr. Trump’s demand for an aircraft befitting the grandeur he believes should accompany his office. Experts familiar with the Air Force One program said they were surprised Mr. Trump had decided to use the Qatari-donated plane for overseas trips.
“People need to be aware it has a lot of shortfalls compared to Air Force One; they do add a measure of risk,” said Frank Kendall, who supervised the presidential plane modernization project, first as the Pentagon acquisition chief and then the Air Force secretary under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. from 2021 until January 2025.
But for Mr. Trump, having to use decades-old planes that frequently needed repairs was an embarrassment. The two 747 jets had been in service since the early 1990s, when the first of them carried President George H.W. Bush from Washington, D.C., to Topeka, Kansas.
“When you land and you see Saudi Arabia, and you see U.A.E., and you see Qatar and you see all these — and they have these brand-new Boeing 747s mostly, and you see ours next to it, this is like a totally different plane,” Mr. Trump told Sean Hannity during an interview on a flight to the Middle East in May 2025. He added: “And we’re the United States of America. I believe that we should have the most impressive plane.”
Air Force officials have said the rapid retrofitting of the Qatari plane was a success, describing it as safe, secure and equipped with the most advanced technologies.
“A testament to the Air Force’s ability to innovate and rapidly evolve to ensure the continuity of our government under any conditions,” Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach, the Air Force’s chief of staff, said in a statement in May.
The White House has also maintained that the Qatari jet poses no risk the president and his entourage. In a statement this week, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, called the new plane “fully mission-ready and safe for presidential travel today.” She said the enhancements it was set to receive this fall would “ensure it remains the most advanced, secure and capable aircraft in the world.”
Fixated on Air Force One
It was December 2016, shortly after Mr. Trump’s first election, and he was being briefed on the lengths that the military goes to harden Air Force One.
In a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Air Force Gen. Carlton D. Everhart II told the incoming president about the “complex and unique systems” required of the Boeing planes “to ensure survivability and reliability,” according to a copy of a once-secret presentation, reported on earlier by TWZ, a website that covers the Pentagon.
General Everhart described how Air Force One served as a mobile command center for President George W. Bush during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Mr. Everhart, who is now retired, said in an interview that Mr. Trump asked about the plans for a modernized Air Force One, expressing confidence about his own expertise.
“I know about my airplane, because I fly all the time,” Mr. Trump told him, as Mr. Everhart recalled, referring to his private plane informally called Trump Force One.
Mr. Trump remained fixated on Air Force One when he regained the White House. Just weeks after his re-election in 2024, Mr. Trump sent the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk to a Boeing airplane hangar in Texas where the two jets were slowly being transformed.
Mr. Musk’s assignment was to find a way to speed up the Boeing effort, as he and others believed the project had gotten bogged down by excessively strict security clearance requirements for some of the workers not involved in sensitive features of the plane.
But the Trump transition team also asked the Air Force for a backup plan, according to former and current Air Force officials: to scour Boeing’s list of all 747-8 airplanes in service to see if there was another in the world that could be quickly procured for Mr. Trump.
Military officials were already concerned about the number of repairs needed for the aging planes in the presidential fleet. The 747-8, the latest model of the Boeing jet, is different than the one that had been used for decades as Air Force One. It has modernized electronic flight controls, a redesigned wing system and engines and a larger cabin and upper deck, among other changes. The Air Force limited the choice to this plane because it has four engines, providing an extra margin of safety if one failed.
But even after locating the Qatari jet, the Air Force knew that it would cost more than $1 billion and take years to install the same features as the planes built to serve as Air Force One, according to Mr. Kendall and other former Air Force officials.
Pentagon documents show that those Boeing jets must undergo a series of major structural changes to be part of the presidential fleet. Holes must be carefully cut into the fuselage to build a lower entryway, allowing the president to exit and enter in less secure environments. An “autonomous baggage loading” system has to be added to reduce the reliance on foreign ground crews.
Hundreds of miles of electrical wiring and electronic components have to be shielded from an electromagnetic pulse, such as from a nuclear weapon detonation.
The official planes also require a second small engine — known as an auxiliary power unit — to be installed near the rear of the jet to serve as a backup for communication systems and other vital electronics gear. They also need some of the most advanced communications equipment and what the Pentagon has called a “self-defense system.”
The missile defense systems include infrared countermeasures, which can detect, track and jam incoming missile threats and are installed on the plane’s wings near the engines and its tail, according to detailed schematics of the planes prepared for emergency responders.
All the upgrades are “inherently expensive,” one Air Force briefing said, outstripping the roughly $400 million the military initially estimated it would cost just for the two jets.
The latest total estimate: $5.1 billion for the entire modernization effort, now slated to be completed in 2028 — 13 years after the Air Force first decided to rely on 747-8 jets for the project.
A Push for Speed
Inside the Oval Office, where Mr. Trump displays a model of a gleaming new Air Force One plane, the president was assessing plans to retrofit the Qatari jet.
Over a series of meetings last year, military officials presented him with printouts outlining the various modifications. The president weighed in on choices for the interior décor and exterior paint color and signed off on the security features and communication systems, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Mr. Trump also made it very clear: He wanted the plane in time for America’s 250th birthday, on July 4, 2026.
Early on, White House officials had expected the upgrades would take 18 to 24 months. Once the timeline was truncated, some officials believed Mr. Trump would only use the retrofitted Qatari jet for domestic travel or to allied countries in safe regions.
By the time the Air Force got ownership of the plane in August, it had less than a year.
On Aug. 8, the 747-8 lifted off from Fort Worth, Texas, where it had been stored for months, and landed in Waco, the home of a sprawling complex owned by L3Harris, a military contractor selected to retrofit the Qatari plane. The terms of the contract and the total price have not been made public.
Executives at L3Harris said that even before starting major work on the plane, it was searched for any listening devices or other electronics that might have been installed before the United States took possession of it.
It was “a very rigorous process, really in advance of us even working on it,” said Jason Lambert, the president of L3Harris’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance division, in a June interview with Breaking Defense, an industry trade publication. He added that the process was “performed by our electronic warfare experts in conjunction with the U.S. government’s leaders in cybersecurity to fully inspect and ensure that everything within that aircraft was safe for the mission.”
The company assigned as many as 400 employees, working around the clock over three shifts, to supercharge the effort.
A top priority: adding a secure communications system so the plane could serve as a global command center.
But from the start, it was clear there would be some limits on what they could do, Mr. Lambert told Breaking Defense. The interior of the plane would get the presidential seal and new wood and leather furnishings, he said. But major adjustments such as moving bulkheads or fixed structures inside the aircraft were not doable.
Documents examined by The Times show other features were also left out.
For decades, Air Force One has allowed the president to arrive at and depart any airport without having to rely on standard ground equipment.
The plane has had a lower side door with self-contained stairs, which is easier to protect. Mr. Trump used that entrance while boarding the old Air Force One last October after the Secret Service discovered what it suspected was a hunter’s stand hidden at the edge of the Palm Beach, Fla., airport.
Mr. Bush also used the lower stairs on Sept. 11, 2001, when he landed unexpectedly at an Air Force base in Louisiana, with military personnel armed with machine guns helping guard him.
But the retrofitted Qatari jet has no such entrance or a similar rear door with self-contained stairs, according to experts who examined photographs of the plane for The Times.
Administration officials did not dispute that. There was a “reduction of the number of airstairs” for autonomous entry and exit, a Pentagon official told The Times.
Photographs of the retrofitted Qatari jet also do not show the infrared countermeasures systems that are installed near the engines of the old Air Force One and documented in the schematics prepared for emergency responders.
Such infrared devices are designed to detect any approaching missile threats, start immediately tracking them and send a high-intensity laser beam into the approaching missile to disrupt its approach, according to one manufacturer.
It is unclear what other self-defense technology may have been added to the Qatari-donated jet. The administration declined to address its security capabilities. A White House official called it “secure and well-protected” and said that officials were always looking for ways to modernize air defense systems.
The Air Force One jets are also supposed to have two auxiliary power units designed to provide electricity if there is a power disruption, even while the plane is in flight.
Only one of these units is visible on the new plane, while two are visible on the old Air Force One. A federal official confirmed that the second unit was not installed on the Qatari jet; the White House did not dispute it was absent.
It is unclear how L3Harris or the Air Force addressed a separate issue that has plagued the Boeing jets: cracks in longitudinal rods that stiffen and support the fuselage skin.
Since 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration has warned the cracks create an “unsafe condition” that “could adversely affect the structural integrity of the airplane.” It ordered owners of 747-8 planes to inspect for such cracks and repair any.
Multiple reports filed with the F.A.A. and Air Force audits detail the expensive and time-consuming efforts to find and fix the cracks in the planes that it is building to serve as Air Force One jets. Some only became apparent when the planes were stripped down to their frames.
Referring to the Qatari-donated plane, the White House official said the aircraft will have those efforts completed as required by the F.A.A., although it did not say if such fixes had been made. L3Harris did not respond to requests for comment.
The plane has another complication: sideways-facing seats. An F.A.A. safety rule mandates that planes with unusual seat arrangements perform special checks with crash-test dummies to ensure that passengers would not be injured during emergency landings.
Documents obtained by The Times show that a subcontractor working on the plane filed paperwork seeking a “special condition” approval from the F.A.A. allowing it to fly.
On July 1, the first day that Mr. Trump was traveling on the new Air Force One, the F.A.A. published a public notice that the request had been approved days earlier.
Similar approvals have been granted for other Boeing 747-8 planes used as luxury carriers. But Sandy Murdock, a former F.A.A. chief counsel, said the approval appeared to be granted just in time for Mr. Trump to fly on the plane.
The White House official said the Air Force had worked with the F.A.A. to ensure the “all Air Force aircraft are safe to fly and operate.”
The rushed process also led to costs far beyond the roughly $400 million in taxpayer money that the Air Force estimated would be spent to retrofit the jet.
During that process, the Air Force had to accelerate training for its pilots, as the 747-8 has a different cockpit than the old jets. To do so, the Air Force leased an Atlas Air cargo 747-8 jet from October until February, a plane that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, to use for “interim pilot qualification training,” records show. The Air Force did not disclose how much it paid for the lease.
Given the tight deadline, the Air Force then moved in December to buy yet another 747-8, this one from Lufthansa to serve as a “dedicated trainer aircraft for aircrew” so that the Pentagon had “immediate operational readiness,” the Air Force said in a statement. It also purchased a second one to supply spare parts. The total cost for both: another $400 million, an Air Force official said.
Both jets will be useful once the new Boeing Air Force One planes are in service. But the need to acquire them so quickly was driven by the arrival of the Qatari jet, the Air Force has said.
The administration has declined to say how the overall project has been financed. But Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink acknowledged in Senate testimony that the government was using funds from a nuclear modernization program called Sentinel. Last summer, $934 million was transferred from that program to an unnamed classified project, as The Times previously reported.
Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, has repeatedly pressed Trump administration officials for information about the costs and security systems of the temporary Air Force One. He said the funding maneuver was an effort to avoid scrutiny.
“We routinely discuss the cost of the existing Air Force One modifications,” Mr. Murphy said. “But they have declared this work to be a national security secret that cannot be divulged even to appropriators. That is absolutely unacceptable.”
A Security Threat
This spring, Mr. Trump’s dream plane finally took to the air again.
At 2:36 p.m. on April 16, just eight months after work began on the jet, it began flying in circles around Texas and Louisiana. Six more test flights followed that month.
By May 1, the Air Force was ready to declare a victory of sorts. “VC-25B Bridge aircraft has officially completed modification and flight testing and is being painted,” the Air Force said in a statement, referring to the formal military name for the retrofitted Qatari jet.
But military officials also acknowledged that they went without certain elements. Overall, the Air Force said, “no risk was taken in security, safety or mission communications, but the collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets,” without providing details.
The plane was moved to a warehouse to be painted. Rather than using the trademark robin’s egg blue and white design commissioned in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy, Mr. Trump wanted a color scheme of red, white, gold and dark blue.
“The baby blue doesn’t fit with us,” he told Fox News.
The Air Force had previously rejected this change pushed by Mr. Trump in his first term, concluding that the darker color “added heat in certain environments” and potentially disrupt sensitive electronic components installed in the lower part of the plane.
But Mr. Trump overrode those objections. He had been showing off a model Air Force One with the new paint scheme for years, both at his Mar-a-Lago club and even at one of his 2025 inaugural balls.
Mr. Trump was effusive last month as he looked over the retrofitted plane, parked inside a hanger at a military base in Maryland.
Standing below his new jet, the president took out one of his Sharpies and signed his name on a mechanical panel on its belly, while the song “Y.M.C.A.,” a Trump rally anthem, blasted on speakers.
“This is a plane that the United States of America should have,” Mr. Trump said July 1 as he prepared to board to take it on a debut flight to North Dakota.
Days later, he flew the new Air Force One to Turkey to attend a NATO meeting.
While he was in Ankara, the United States resumed airstrikes on the neighboring country of Iran. The war was just 1,000 miles away from the president.
Early in the morning of July 8, a military official shared bad news with Mr. Trump, who was in his suite at the JW Marriott, according to a person familiar with the situation. U.S. officials judged there to be a credible threat that Iranian proxy forces were targeting him. The Secret Service wanted to change the plans for his departure.
That morning, Mr. Trump announced that the Qatari-donated plane would fly ahead to Mildenhall Air Force Base in the United Kingdom so U.S. service members could see it.
The president, who would later get back on the Qatari jet in England, made no mention of the security threat when he announced the change on Truth Social.
For his part, Mr. Trump would fly out of Ankara on the old Air Force One, he wrote, “for old time’s sake.”
Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt, Greg Kendall-Ball and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
