Triumph

Washington-if Donald Trump wants someone to blame for having to travel in a 40-year-old Air Force, could consider starting with a long look in the mirror.

And if the Americans want to blame someone that their future presidents are loaded with a plane that lacks a key capacity in war times, they should consider taking a look at the current president.

The drama that surrounds Trump’s turn to Qatar’s royal family for 747 luxurious to meet his needs while attacking Boeing for not finishing replacement airplanes quickly hidden enough a couple of simple facts: the entire debacle began with the image of Trump as a “first instance of deact The flight, severely degrading within the framework of a usefulness in the cursed.

Before assuming the first time in 2017, Trump already boasted that he would force Boeing, who had been on the way to deliver two new and designed at the end of that period, to reduce the price of his contract.

To meet Trump’s demands, the Air Force agreed to abandon a process that is already in progress and, instead, buy and modernize two already built planes whose buyer had gone to bankruptcy. Among the characteristics that were reduced from the list of specifications were the refueling of fuel on the flight, thus reducing the amount of time that a commander in chief can remain high to only about 15 hours, instead of a week or more.

If an plane that transports to the president cannot replenish in the air, that severely limits how and where a president can travel and be out of danger in case of an important attack against the United States.

“That was a decision that was not taken by the Air Force, but taken by the White House,” said the then president of Chiefs of General Staff Joseph Dunford, Joseph Dunford, at an audience in 2017, admitting that, in case of an attack against the United States, the lack of refilling capabilities in the air “will certainly be a limiting factor and we will have to plan accordingly.”

In addition, it is not clear if Trump’s interference in the program will have saved taxpayers a penny. Although the “fixed price” contract means that Boeing was forced to absorb its excesses of costs, the delays that Trump caused has required the Air Force to spend millions more on repairs and maintenance of the existing 747 who entered the service under George Hw Bush in 1990.

And none of that includes the new cargo taxpayers who must now support the gift of Qatar to Trump, the most expensive that has given a foreign nation to an American president and an apparent violation of the clear prohibition of the Constitution against them, into an Air Force before taking him to his presidential library when he leaves the position, since he says he intends to do.

The modification of the plane could take many months or even years, which means that those hundreds of millions of dollars or more will be spent so that Trump can use the plane for just several months or potentially at all, assuming that he, in fact, leaves the position in 2029 as required by the Constitution.

White House officials did not respond to News themezone’s consultations on this issue, and the Air Force said the contract to modify the Qatar plane for Trump’s interim use was considered classified, despite the fact that routine press releases have previously published in the Air Force One program.

Wilfredo Lee / AP

Trump himself, in a discussion about the Qatar plane with News presenter, Sean Hannity, said he wanted the new plane because the current Air Force One is not large enough and “impressive.”

“When you land and see Saudi Arabia and see eau and see Qatar and see all this, and have these new Boeing 747, and you will see ours next to,” Trump said on his way to the Arab Peninsula earlier this month. “It’s much smaller, it’s much less impressive.”

Military aviation analyst Richard Abouulafia said that all the problems with the program are completely the creation of Trump, and that if the president had kept his hands outside the process that began during the Obama administration, he would probably already fly in the replacement plans.

“This was Trump trying to look like a great negotiator,” Abouulafia said. “I would almost certainly be flying on a new plane now.”

He started with a tweet.

Like so much involving the policy and controversy of the United States in recent years, it began with a Trump tweet.

“Boeing is building a new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but the costs are out of control, more than $ 4 billion. Cancel the order!” He wrote a month after winning the 2016 elections for President, but a good six weeks before assuming the position.

Trump had built his reputation by representing an intelligent and intelligent entrepreneur as the host of the reality show “The Apprentice”, and his statement that the United States government was being used by Boeing in his contract still below the negotiation for two replacement Air Force One Jets promoted that same issue.

“I don’t want a plane to fly when it costs $ 4.2 billion,” he told an audience in one of his manifestations in Pennsylvania 10 days later. “We are going to reduce the price, very down.”

Trump for years has been presented as an aircraft expert, possibly because he has had some and has briefly directed a small airline before he sink, but expresses opinions that suggest that it is not. For example, once he boasted that his Boeing 757 personnel was actually larger than Air Force One, although he had 75 feet shorter in length and a fraction of the weight.

In any case, Trump promises to save money in the new Air Force One Led Boeing CEO to travel to Trump Country Club’s house in Palm Beach, Florida, to establish options to reduce the costs of the two planes. Trump, just a month after taking office, already boasted that he had reduced the $ 1 billion of the price. (The White House in a matter of weeks reduced the savings claimed to “millions”).

Part of the plan was to acquire the aircraft at a low price. The Transaero Russian airline had ordered two 747-8, but subsequently had gone bankrupt. The planes were being stored in the Mojave desert to avoid corrosion, and Boeing was anxious to download them. While the final sale price was never revealed, it was believed that the Government paid considerably less than $ 380 million per list of aircraft.

But the main mission of the jets that serve as Air Force One is to serve as military command and control platforms, if the need arises, and acquiring fuselages is a mere first step.

The existing part of 747-200 was built in the middle of the 1980s and service placed in 1990. They have the plumbing for fuel replenishment and armored electronics against electromagnetic pulses from the explosions of nuclear weapons, advanced systems for encrypted communications, several different flats against missiles and the ability to generate sufficient electricity to generate sufficient electricity feed everything. All these and probably more were on the list of characteristics that the Air Force had wanted in the new 747.

However, it turns out that demolishing a passenger lining already completed and installing the required configuration and equipment was considerably more difficult than building a new “online” at the Boeing assembly plant in Everett, Washington.

Abouulafia compared it to the construction of a house from scratch with all the comforts that you want to plan in advance, compared to buying an existing house and having to start the walls and floors, replace all the wiring, plumbing and duct work and then finish everything.

“It is extremely difficult to do as a modernization,” he said about the main necessary modifications. “It’s much easier to do that online.”

Among the first characteristics that were dropped in the new contract were the refueling of fuel on the flight, an important structural modification that would have required new pipes that come out from where the fuel pen of a flying tank truck joins in the nose of a plane and then down and back to the fuel tanks. Other changes were also made, such as a reduction in energy generation capacity to execute all systems and use the standard Boeing environmental control system instead of a specialized one.

Trump insisted on a new red, white and dark blue scheme to replace the iconic light blue and polished silver than those of the Air Force have had since the 1960s, but an analysis found that the dark blue paint in the lower part of the plane would cause excessive heating in sensitive components. The new colors were discarded during the Biden administration, and it is not clear if Trump will once again insist on their preferred paint work.

At the end of 2016, the Air Force was estimating that the new 747-8, built from scratch, would be in service for 2023 or 2024, more or less coinciding with the time frame required by those delivered in 1990.

At the end of 2024, the Air Force estimated that the two modernized aircraft acquired in 2017, its interior and reconstructed interiors and systems, would be ready by 2028 or 2029, possibly later.

Because Trump demanded that Boeing sign a fixed price contract, the company began to lose money at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic due to the interruptions of the supply chain and the shortage of workers qualified with the necessary security authorization. By 2023, its losses in the contract of $ 3.9 billion in which Trump had been coerced by about $ 2 billion.

“A unique set of risks that Boeing should probably not have taken,” CEO David Calhoun, who replaced the Boeing executive who had reached the agreement with Trump, admitted in a 2022 earning call call. “But we are where we are.”

Trump, while lie about how much money he has “saved,” he told Hannity that the contract not endless of Boeing at the end of 2016 was worth $ 5.7 billion, instead of the $ 4.2 billion, even that he was quoting at that time, still regularly blames Boeing.

“I’m not happy with Boeing,” Trump told journalists who were traveling with him on Air Force One on February 19, then hinted at the efforts that were already underway to request a plane from Qatar. “We can do something else. We can go buy a plane, get a plane or something.”

A true war struggle platform, no longer

The degradation of Trump of Air Force One as a military asset, ironically, occurs when simultaneously boasting that the “fight against war” is the highest priority in the Department of Defense, which accuses of having become soft under the predecessor Joe Biden.

When he was young, Trump had the opportunity to serve in Vietnam, but avoided doing it by producing a diagnosis of “bone spur” of a friendly doctor with his father. As a candidate for president in 2015, he belittled Senator John McCain, who spent almost six years in a prison in Hanoi, like “not a hero War. “And as president, he called the service members who die from his country” dumb “and” losers “, according to his own chief of cabinet.

Despite this, he continues to give his audience about his 2018 visit to Iraq aboard Air Force One, without race lights and tones of drawn windows, such as a feat of a tremendous courage, despite the fact that similar trips had been made George W. Bush and Barack Obama while Biden had visited Ukraine and Israel, two active warfares not under the control of the military. A commode.

“I left the plane and I really asked my people: ‘You know’, I said, ‘I apologize, I was very brave sitting in that cabin. Is it allowed to give myself the medal of honor of the congress?'” Trump said in a February speech in Miami Beach.

Since he won the presidency in November, Trump and his Secretary of Defense, former News Weekend presenter, Pete Hegseth, regularly boasts that they are bringing a spirit of “warrior” in the Pentagon to put the highest priority in the “war fight.”

However, Trump, when intervening in the details of a technical contract, has turned the future Air Force aircraft with Boeing Air Force with war fighting platforms less capable than T current current, with a potentially less capable version capable of entering the service, depending on how much or little the Qatar plane is made.

The Air Force acquisition officer, Darlene Costello, told Congress in Testimony earlier this year that it could be further required to allow one of the two already ordered airplanes to enter the service in 2027, although she did not provide details.

It is not clear if Trump cares much that aspect compared to the impression that his plane leaves his world leaders.

“We are the United States of America, I think we should have the most impressive plane,” Trump told Hannity.

“Apparently, look good is more important than protecting the country,” said Abouulafia, adding that he still cannot understand a president flying on an plane that had been property and directed by a foreign government. “It would be a great risk of flight safety.”