President Donald Trump will fly his aging Air Force One out of Turkey, ditching the Qatari-gifted jet he calls “the world’s most luxurious plane,” a decision experts suggest was made based on security equipment concerns.
Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday that he’d fly the old plane from Turkey to the UK — sending the new jet ahead separately so U.S. troops could tour it. “For old time’s sake,” he wrote.
Andrew Feinberg, White House correspondent for The Independent, wrote on X, posited another reason for the switch.
“The most likely reason for this is that the ‘new’ ex-Qatari jet doesn’t have the self-defense capabilities needed when flying from Turkey while in a shooting war with Iran,” Feinberg wrote. “The actual VC-25 aircraft does have those capabilities.”
Frank Kendall, who served as Air Force secretary under President Joe Biden, according to MS NOW, also raised concerns about safety.
“The biggest thing — and I can’t say a lot about it because of classification — will be the degree to which it has command and control capability on the aircraft,” Kendall said.
The post went live hours after Trump declared the Iran ceasefire was “over” at the NATO summit in Ankara, where he also told reporters the U.S. would “very probably hit” Iran again that night. According to US Central Command, the two countries had been trading live fire since Tuesday, when Iran attacked three commercial tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. hit more than 80 Iranian targets in response.
The War Zone has confirmed the old plane — in service since 1990 — carries missile defense systems, radar jammers, and shielding against the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear blast. Whether the new Qatari jet has any of that remains classified and unconfirmed, the outlet reported.
The Air Force said only that its team “made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets.”
When The War Zone asked Jason Lambert, president of L3Harris’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance division — the contractor that built the new plane — whether it was hardened against a nuclear blast and had full command-and-control capability, he said: “That’s one I’ll have to direct you back to the Air Force.”
“Americans deserve answers on how the administration has decided to spend their taxpayer dollars, and ignore real national security concerns, in the rushed VC-25B Bridge aircraft retrofit program … all in service of delivering President Trump a pretty, fancy plane for his personal enjoyment,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and 12 Senate Democratic colleagues wrote in a letter Tuesday demanding answers and calling the program a national security risk.
“Spitballing here, but perhaps one reason it doesn’t have those capabilities is because Trump wants to keep it if he leaves office,” conservative attorney George Conway wrote on X, quoting Feinberg. Trump has said he plans to donate the jet to his presidential library.
To fund the conversion, the Air Force diverted money from the Sentinel nuclear missile program, according to the senators’ letter.
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