Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images
As catnip for a high-end mendicant like Donald Trump, the Boeing 747-8 is unbeatable. It’s an exquisite machine, a perfect consummation of form and function and last in a line of one of the greatest airplanes ever built. It’s also a haunting specter for Boeing of a supremacy it achieved and then lost.
The Qatari donors were obviously well aware of the jet’s allure to Trump as a $400 million freebie. But now the president, Boeing, and the 747-8 are locked in a storm of rebuke that needs unpacking and, when it is, the Qataris appear in a very different light.
To begin with, Trump has no grasp of or patience for the technology involved. The Associated Press reported that on his flight this week to the Middle East, he complained that the Gulf States all have “these brand-new Boeing 747s” while he was stuck using a version nearly 40 years old. That childish tantrum suggests that he has walked unsuspectingly into what will probably end as a fiasco.
After years of frustration with Boeing’s inability to deliver the two authorized Air Force One replacements during his presidency, Trump just wants the damned airplane because it’s such an irresistible luxury and symbol of power. But the reality is that the Qatari jet can’t ever be upgraded to meet the mandated requirement for Air Force One that it should be able to repel a missile or drone attack. So forget it being anything other than a gift for the president’s retirement.
It must be maddening for him that the president of China, Xi Jinping, is flying around the globe in his own converted 747-8, something he is able to enjoy because it wasn’t left to Boeing to do an upgrade. Nobody knows exactly what the Chinese military did to the airplane to satisfy their own standards of survivability, but we do know the luxury accommodations were provided by Lufthansa Technik, a German company that specializes in bespoke makeovers of large jets for corporate titans and very rich potentates like the sultan of Brunei, the details of which the company never discloses.
It’s only reasonable to add, though, that Air Force One is, whoever the president, inarguably a projection of American prestige, power, and engineering excellence, and it’s not a good look that the current aging Air Force One is no match for China’s version.
It didn’t begin that way. From the moment when it was launched in 1970, the 747, double the size of any previous jet, was a marvel of American engineering audacity. More than that, it introduced something new to the human experience, affordable global travel for many millions of people, thanks to the transformative economics of its jumbo size and more efficient engines. The world shrank, oceans were nonchalantly referred to as “ponds,” and a new threshold to travel, the international airport, became a place of wonder. The master engineer who created the 747, Joe Sutter, designed it so that it could grow in passenger capacity as engines became more powerful.
As a result, there were four significant upgrades, ending with the 747-8. They can be visually traced by the incremental extension of the inimitable hump on the top — beginning with the truncated original with space only for the pilots to the 747-8 where the hump became a fully extended upper passenger deck. The current Air Force One is 38 years old, a 747-200, the first of the upgrades.
Sutter pushed hard for the 747-8 as the ultimate version of his airplane (and as his swan song with Boeing). This step change was long delayed and ended up as the most extensive and costly. It added not just another generation of engines that were far more fuel efficient but a new wing and advanced flight controls. It was also a lot quieter, greatly adding to its luxury appeal.
However, the delay meant that the 747-8 had missed its moment. The market had moved on from super-large jumbos with four engines. (The even larger Airbus A380, for example, was never bought by any American airline, and its production ended in 2021 without recovering its development costs.) Boeing had fallen into a liminal trap partly of its own making. The nemesis of the 747 was the twin-engine 777 that airlines preferred for long haul because “the big twin” as it was called was more cost efficient per seat than a jumbo.
Only 155 747-8s were built, and 107 of those were the freighter version. Production ended in 2022. It was intended to be replaced by a new, larger version of the 777. That has not worked out as planned. That airplane’s development has, like other Boeing programs, been plagued by problems, including dangerous software glitches that caused the Federal Aviation Administration to delay its certification. As a result, the first deliveries to airlines have been put back to next year — eight years later than originally intended. The prolonged hiatus has allowed Airbus to outsell Boeing with its two big twins, the A330 and A350.
This is where it starts to look as though Trump should have been wary of Qataris bearing gifts. The 13-year-old 747-8 that they are proposing to offload on Trump follows the path of another that they “gifted” to the autocratic Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2018 — officially to the Turkish state, not to him personally, though it fits his imperial tastes.
If the two jumbos turned out in the end to be more of a financial burden than even the megarich Qatari royals are prepared to any longer tolerate (they own some smaller Airbus wide-bodies that cost less to operate), then the 747-8 would surely prove to be well beyond the means of the Trump Organization to keep in the air for very long.
Trump’s current corporate jet, a single-aisle Boeing 757, was 20 years old when he bought it in 2011 and was refurbished in Trump Tower style with many gold fixtures. A cabin that had more than 230 coach seats as a commercial jet was stripped out and luxuriously remodeled to accommodate around 40 people. But for its size, it was costly to operate. The twin engines alone guzzled $7,000 of gas an hour. For much of the time while Trump was out of office the 757 was parked and he used a smaller corporate jet, but it played a prominent role in his 2024 campaign. However, the 757 is unlikely ever to fly Trump again.
For his retirement, Trump could ask his buddy Elon Musk for advice — a swish corporate jet like the Gulfstream 650ER that Musk uses can go anywhere in the world at a fraction of the cost of a 747-8.
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