President Donald Trump is getting a swanky new plane thanks to the generosity of Qatar—and American taxpayers.
Though the $400 million “flying palace” will indeed be gifted “free of charge” by the Qatari Defense Ministry to the Pentagon, the cost of retrofitting and maintaining the Boeing 747-8 to make it safe and secure enough to transport Trump can easily add up to millions of dollars.
“It is important to remember that Air Force One is not just some gold-plated luxury jet,” Connecticut Rep. Joe Courtney said in a statement on Monday. “It requires extensive, advanced security and communications capabilities.”
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The aircraft would have to be torn down and rebuilt to install secure presidential communication lines, self-defense technology, and electromagnetic shielding. Former Air Force acquisitions chief Andrew Hunter told Politico that retrofitting costs would likely fall “in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Hunter said sweeping the Qatari-gifted jet for software modifications or embedded technology would incur an additional fee: “That’s not a trivial thing to do. That alone would cost tens of millions of dollars.”
Courtney, the top Democrat on the House Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, said the gift “would present significant, needless cost and delay issues for retrofitting the Qatari plane and distract the Air Force’s efforts speed up delivery of the actual new Air Force One fleet.”
Former Air Force official Kevin Buckley noted that retrofitting would also come at a cost to an already limited military manpower.
“If you’re pulling people into doing this new thing, you’re not pulling them out of the air,” he told Politico. “You’re pulling them out of the same labor pool—and a very specialized one. You’re talking about people with high clearances who already have a ton of work on their plate.”
Maintaining and operating a presidential aircraft is no cheap task, either. The Pentagon reportedly estimated in 2021 that long-term operations and support costs for Air Force One, a VC-25B aircraft, could rack up to $7.7 billion.
“This gift could become a very expensive asset to own and operate,” Hunter said. “You might even ask why Qatar no longer wants the aircraft. And the answer may be that it’s too expensive for them to maintain.”
Trump’s gift from Qatar is valued at $400 million—more than 17 times the amount that Republicans claim was gifted to former President Joe Biden and his associates, according to Media Matters.
Boeing is already way behind its initial target of delivering two new Air Force One planes by 2024. Last week, Air Force acquisition official Darlene Costello told Congress that delivery could be around 2027, and only if Boeing and the government can agree on trading off certain requirements to reach that point.
In February, Trump said he was “not happy” with Boeing over the delivery delays.
“There’s no excuse for it,” he told reporters. “We may do something else. We may go and buy a plane, or get a plane or something.”
