Over the past few weeks he’s gone back to old, tested and secured Boeing 747-200B series jets for domestic campaign travel…
The Qatar , Gold plastered ‘Bridge’ Air Force One ‘B-747-8 is nowhere to be seen….
Word has been that the ‘Bridge’ Jet ain’t equipped up to standard security wise….
Donald said it would be back in use in a few weeks…..
That was two months ago……
The other two Air Force One jets being converted from a Russian airline forfeiture?
Maybe they’ll be ready for the next President in. two years….
They have been working on those jets for about a decade….
The current jets?
They ‘re 30+ years old…..
President Donald Trump has at least temporarily abandoned using the luxury jumbo jet he solicited from Qatar, using instead a decades-old, purpose-built Air Force 747 in the iconic blue-and-white color scheme for his travel over the past two weeks.
Trump crowed about the newer plane, even showing off its interior decorations to reporters on its first flight as Air Force One, but has not explained why he stopped flying it in the middle of last month. The Qatari plane does not have the self-defense capabilities of the custom-built planes.
For his trip to the United Nations on Sept. 21-22; to Knoxville, Tennessee, on Sept. 26 to watch a college football game; to Chicago on Sept. 27 to watch a golf tournament; and to Dallas on Thursday for a rally in neighboring Oklahoma, Trump has taken the modified Boeing 747 with the tail number 29000 rather than the $150 million “gift” the Qatari royal family “gave” him after he asked.
And on Friday, Trump again is taking the 35-year-old jet whose condition and size he has bemoaned in the past, saying other world leaders had larger planes, to a rally in Mobile, Alabama…..
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Trump infamously took his new “gift” from Qatar to the NATO summit in Turkey — just a few hundred miles from the border with Iran, against which he launched a war on Feb. 28 — only to have to announce that he would use the older, real Air Force One instead for the trip home. Trump in the end snuck off that plane in a catering truck and flew on a different government jet from Turkey to Great Britain, where he switched to the Qatari jet for the final leg back to Washington.
Aviation expert Richard Aboulafia, with the AeroDynamic Advisory consulting group, said he can think of a whole host of reasons not to use the Qatari plane: “Safety, safety, safety, national security, safety, national security, and so on….
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Trump’s insistence on a larger plane — the Qatari 747-8 is 250 feet from nose to tail, 18 feet longer than the Air Force’s older-model 747-200s — has also cost taxpayers at least hundreds of millions of dollars to install communications and other equipment. Trump’s Department of Defense has deemed exact information about those costs “classified” — even though the contracts for the previous Air Force Ones were public records.
Trump has also said he plans to take the Qatari jet with him to his presidential library, although how that would be legal is unclear. Previous Air Force Ones, most notably the modified Boeing 707 on display at the Ronald Reagan Library in California, remain the property of the Air Force and are on loan to libraries and museums….
Note…
You DID get the part about Trump spending taxpayer money on upgrading the Qatar jet so he think he can keep it after he leaves office?
image…instargram
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