An inflatable emergency slide on the new Air Force One was accidentally deployed 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 mistakenly 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.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The deployment of the slide was 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 him flying aboard the Qatari plane.
Mr. Trump declared then 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.
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