President Trump’s former royal Qatari 747 is now ready to be Air Force One

If the aircraft used to cart around the President of the United States were a car, it would be the equivalent of a Geo Storm. Both were introduced in 1990, both are classics in their own way, and both—frankly—need to be replaced. You might love President Trump or hate him but there’s going to be another POTUS one day,, and we can’t have the Leader of the Free World rolling around in a jalopy.

Would you want to fly in a 35-year-old airplane, even if it was maintained by the Air Force’s finest? It’s hard to blame the guy for wanting a replacement when you think about it that way.

Officially designated the VC-25B Bridge, the Boeing 747 that was once owned by Qatar’s ruling al-Thani Family and controversially gifted to Donald Trump will be ready to fly as Air Force One this summer. The Air Force says it has officially completed modification and flight testing and is being painted a vibrant red, white, and blue.

Air Force One is only called “Air Force One” when the president is aboard. In their regular life, the current fleet of Boeing 747s are simply VC-25A (a prefix meaning “VIP Cargo”). Their radio callsign changes with which VIP happens to be aboard. A plane carrying the vice-president is Air Force Two. for every other dignitary, including former presidents, the callsign would be SAM (Special Air Mission) 28000 or 29000, depending on which VC-25A is being used.

The VC-25 Bridge will be no different. but how it got to fly the president is steeped in controversy. You might have heard something about it.

Qatar’s royal family offered the U.S. government a Boeing 747-8 luxury jet—valued at roughly $400 million—which the Trump administration officially accepted by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in May 2025 for use as an interim Air Force One. Critics from both parties immediately flagged the sheer scale of the gift from a foreign government as unprecedented and ethically problematic.⁠

The Emoluments Clause of the Constitution prohibits federal officials from accepting gifts from foreign states without congressional consent. Legal scholars and Democratic lawmakers argued the deal violated that principle, while the Trump administration maintained the gift was made to the U.S. government, not to Trump personally, and was therefore permissible.

Unusually, criticism was not confined to Democrats. Conservative commentators, including Ben Shapiro, called it “skeezy,” pointing to longstanding allegations that Qatar has historically financed extremist groups (allegations Qatar denies). Republicans in Congress rejected a legislative push to block Trump from using the jet.

⁠⁠Trump personally argued that the gift would save taxpayers money, that he wouldn’t continue use of the aircraft when his term is over, and that he would donate it to his own presidential library⁠​—but would it really save money?

Air Force One Billion

The current VC-25A planes used to cart the president and his massive entourage around the world cost upwars of $210,000 per flight hour, making it the most expensive plane in the Air Force to fly. Part of that is due to its age. Commercial carriers don’t fly the 747-200 anymore, so replacement parts for maintenance have to be custom made or salvaged.

It costs the United States $84 million every year to maintain them, so with that in mind, a savings of $400 million in the form of a free airplane seems like a pretty good deal. But some argue those savings are lost in the costs of upgrading and retrofitting the plane, which were iinitially estimated to be upwards of $1 billion.

The actual cost of its retrofit was classified, but when $934 million disappeared from a Pentagon program to upgrade and revamp the U.S. ground based-nuclear missile arsenal, it led many to believe that was where the new Air Force One’s overhaul money came from—a lot of moolah for something that was supposed to be a bridge between the two homegrown presidential transport programs.

Trump’s gifted VC-25 got the moniker “Bridge” because it was intended to cross a gap between the current system and the new VC-25B that has been in development hell since 2018. New aircraft were supposed to have been delivered by 2024 but the program has now been delayed to 2028.

High turnover, complex technology, and the disagreement over whether a plane that can fly nearly 9,000 miles really needs an aerial refueling capability. These delays have also cost taxpayers a cool billion dollars. Yes: another whole other billion dollars.

At this point, critics and supporters alike should realize that it really doesn’t matter what we think. The difference between one billion and two is negligible to both Boeing and the Pentagon. So President Trump is getting a new plane, one described as a “palace in the sky.”

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