A military aide accidentally deployed an inflatable emergency slide on the new Air Force One on Wednesday, delaying President Trump’s departure to Dallas, according to a person familiar with the episode.
Mr. Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews that officials were just checking on the slide. He did not acknowledge it had been inadvertently deployed.
“They want to make sure everything works perfectly,” he said, noting that he would be delayed only about 15 minutes.
Mr. Trump eventually took off on the plane to Dallas, where he is attending the Republican midterm convention.
“As the president has said, the slide was checked out to make sure everything works perfectly,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said in a statement. “Air Force One is on its way to Dallas so he can deliver his much-anticipated speech to a raucous and sold-out crowd.”
The White House declined to share any details on the incident, but the emergency escape slide in the Boeing 747-8 operates in a fashion similar to an airbag, as it is rapidly inflated in an emergency with high-pressure compressed gas cylinders.
After the slide has been deployed, it has to be carefully folded and inspected before it can be reinstalled and the inflation mechanism has to be reset and certified.
But to get a plane back in service more quickly, a replacement emergency slide device could be installed with certified technicians, according to documentation about the system published by aviation parts suppliers.
The new Air Force One, a 747-8, has an unusual evacuation slide because one of its doors is high off the ground and requires an abnormally long slide that has to be extendable, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The deployment of the inflatable slide marked the latest challenge in Mr. Trump’s efforts to fly on the new presidential aircraft, which was donated by the Qatari government.
Once the U.S. government took ownership of the plane, it was quickly retrofitted so that the president could start flying it as soon as possible. The New York Times reported that the Qatari jet lacked defensive capabilities that the older models have.
Concerns about the new plane’s capabilities came under more scrutiny when Mr. Trump took it to the NATO summit in Turkey in July. Multiple people with knowledge of the matter said that there had been a security concern about his flying aboard the Qatari plane.
Mr. Trump declared that he would fly on one of the older presidential aircraft for his departure, instead of the Qatari jet that he had flown aboard to Turkey, for “old time’s sake.”
Although he boarded the older plane at the airport in Ankara, Turkey, it later emerged that the president had been whisked off it and onto a military jet, leaving the older Air Force One aircraft as a decoy flight.
Eric Lipton contributed reporting.
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