WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s suggestion that he will retrofit the luxury jumbo jet he solicited from Qatar with missile defense systems in just one month has left aviation experts scratching their heads.
“I assume this is more for satirical value,” said Richard Aboulafia with the AeroDynamic Advisory consulting group. “The idea of installing it in a month is comical.”
Trump made the claim Sunday evening in response to a HuffPost question about why he was flying an aircraft that lacks missile defenses. Multiple systems to evade heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles are easily visible on the purpose-built Boeing 747s that have been used as Air Force One for 35 years. None can be seen on the plane Trump now favors for its luxury features.
“As I understand it, in about a month or so, they’re going to send it to have it be maxed out. So they’re going to be sending it, and they’ll have it be maxed out. It’ll take about a month,” Trump said, without specifying what he meant.
The Air Force, which was in charge of modifying the plane after taking custody of it a year ago, declined to comment on what new modifications Trump was referring to. The White House similarly would not say what, if any, missile defense systems would be added.
Instead, press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered this statement: “The new Air Force One is perfectly safe for the president’s travels, but will receive additional upgrades and enhancements in the fall which will take approximately one month to complete. During that time, the president will fly on the old Air Force One.”
It is unclear what Leavitt meant by “perfectly safe,” given that Trump opted to use the older Air Force One equipped with missile defense features when leaving this month’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, a mere 600 miles from Iran’s border at a time his five-month-old war with that nation had flared up again. Trump sent the Qatari 747 ahead to England and then swapped planes there for the final leg back to Washington, D.C.
Trump frequently speaks imprecisely and often fabricates a story on the fly to get past a difficult moment, which then requires his staff or others in the administration to invent a backstory or policy rationale for his statement.
Jeremiah Gertler, an aviation analyst for the Teal Group with extensive work with U.S. government agencies, said Trump’s off-the-cuff answer Sunday may be another of those episodes.
“This is the first that I or anybody else in the business has heard about it,” Gertler said of Trump’s plans to “max out” the Qatari jet.
Andrew Leyden via Getty Images
While the military has been equipping large planes like aerial tankers and transports with an infrared laser device to confuse or destroy missiles relatively quickly, that can only be done when the plane in question has been designed to have it installed. That is not the case with a 747 that’s been built and fitted out for luxury passenger travel, Gertler said.
“First there’s the design part, figuring out where it will go. Then you’ve got the installation, and then you’ve got the integration,” he said. “There would not be a precedent for doing it quickly for a plane that you haven’t been working with.”
Gertler added that trying to install an IR missile defense system quickly — one commonly used by the military is the Large Aircraft Infrared Countermeasures, or LAIRCM — would likely mean taking one currently scheduled to be installed on a different plane.
Aboulafia said even that is far-fetched for the time frame Trump gave. “You could maybe spiff up the carpets in a month, if they need spiffing. But that’s about it,” he said.
Trump’s rationale for having asked the Qatari royal family for the plane is that other world leaders now have planes larger than the original Air Force 747s, and he believes the United States president should have the largest plane. He said he solicited the Qatari jet because he did not believe Congress would be willing to pay for a plane for him with the high-end finishes he wanted.
On the issue of plane size, the only reason Trump is not currently flying new, purpose-built Air Force 747s the same length as the Qatari 747 ― the newer, 747-8s are 250 feet long, or 18 feet longer than the older 747-200s ― is that he meddled in the Obama-era contract for the follow-on Air Force One aircraft. Trump accused Boeing of cheating the government and demanded a cheaper contract.
The solution the company and the Air Force came up with was to purchase two already-built 747s that had been ordered by a Russian airline that subsequently went out of business. The delivery date for those planes, however, is years behind schedule because it turned out to be far more difficult and expensive to retrofit existing airframes than to build new ones to Air Force specifications in the first place.