Air Force One due for an upgrade
Federal officials hope to sign a contract soon to build a new version of Air Force One to replace the current model of the president’s airplane, which began flying in 1990.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has made clear what he will miss the most when he leaves office in 15 months. “People sometimes ask me what the biggest perk of being president is,” he told visitors at the White House last week. “No. 1 is the plane.”
In September, he told another audience that “the plane is nice” and that unfortunately for him “my lease is running out,” so he might soon have to “start taking off my shoes again going through security.” In Kenya in July, he noted that when he visited as a young man his luggage was lost: “That doesn’t happen on Air Force One.”
Let’s face it: The plane is, in fact, pretty nice, and the president’s luggage is indeed very rarely lost. But the plane is also getting old. And so after more than a million miles of flying while in office, its current primary passenger is planning to bequeath his successor — or perhaps his successor’s successor — a new-and-improved Air Force One spiffed up for the smartphone age.
The Defense Department hopes to sign an initial contract with Boeing in the coming weeks to begin the long process of assembling a new presidential aircraft capable of ferrying the commander in chief around the world with the capacity to run a war from midair if necessary. Built on the frame of a Boeing 747-8, it will be bigger, more powerful, able to fly farther and vastly more advanced technologically than the current customized Boeing 747-200B jumbo jet.
Obama himself will not benefit from the trade-in. By some estimates, the new plane may not be available until 2023, when Hillary Rodham Clinton or Donald Trump or whoever beats them may be close to finishing up a second term. And it will not be cheap. The Air Force has asked for $102 million in the coming fiscal year and $3 billion over the next five years, not counting any further cost.
“It’s way overdue,” said Joseph W. Hagin, a White House deputy chief of staff under President George W. Bush who initiated plans for a new plane only to see them shelved when the nation’s finances grew precarious. “You can hang new engines on it, you can cram all sorts of new technology on it, but it’s still a very old airplane.”
Air Force One is actually not a single plane; in fact, it is a radio call sign used for any plane that happens to carry the president. There are two 747-200s, designated VC-25As by the Air Force, that carry the president unless he travels to a place where the runway is too short, in which case he switches to a smaller plane.
Those 747-200s, with tail codes 28000 and 29000, were commissioned by Ronald Reagan and delivered in 1990 under the first President George Bush, when the Soviet Union was still around and White House aides used beepers. The big communications innovation at the time was a fax machine that the president’s staff could use to keep in touch with the ground.
Boeing stopped making 747-200s more than two decades ago, and only 20 of them are left flying in the world, mainly as freight planes in developing countries. Spare parts are no longer made for the plane, so the Air Force has them custom built. Inspections and maintenance work are so frequent that one or the other of the two planes is often out of service.
Air Force One, of course, is not just a plane. It is power. It is national identity. It is even a movie star. The large blue-and-white aircraft with “United States of America” emblazoned on the side has come to symbolize the country and has captured the imagination of even Americans who have not seen the namesake film starring Harrison Ford as a president fending off Russian hijackers.