Transforming a former Qatari royal jet into President Donald Trump’s new Air Force One will likely cost less than $400 million, the U.S. Air Force’s top civilian told lawmakers June 5.
“Those are classified, sensitive capabilities that we put on the platform,” Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink said at a House Armed Services Committee hearing. “But . . . we believe the actual retrofit of that aircraft is actually probably less than $400 million.”
That price tag is far lower than the roughly $1 billion Democratic lawmakers have alleged modifying the Qatari jet would cost. Most of that figure consists of money the Air Force would spend anyway, such as for training assets and spare parts, Meink said. He declined to discuss details of the retrofit in public.
It’s the first time an Air Force official has publicly stated how much money retrofitting the Qatari plane to meet the needs of an American president could cost U.S. taxpayers.
Qatar agreed to gift Trump the jet for free after Trump approached the Middle East ally about selling the plane this winter, according to news reports. But The Washington Post reported May 28 that an Air Force inspection found the jet was “very poorly maintained” and could require $1.5 billion to prepare it to fly the commander-in-chief.
The Air Force is in charge of overhauling the plane because it oversees the portfolio of executive airlift jets that carry America’s civilian and military leaders around the world. To transport the president, jetliners require significant upgrades to defensive and communication systems, as well as other changes to accommodate regular travel with a sizable staff and press corps.
L3Harris is working with the Air Force to modify the Qatari plane, CNBC reported last month.
Though the Pentagon announced May 21 that the military had accepted the Qatari airframe and would move forward with the retrofit, The Washington Post reported that the two countries were still hashing out the legal terms of an agreement to transfer the luxury plane. The White House has said the royal plane will be ready to fly as Air Force One while Trump is still in office.
Congressional Democrats have decried the jetliner as an illegal bribe and introduced multiple bills to deter the transfer or block it outright.
The U.S. military is already in the process of bringing on two new planes that would serve as Air Force One when the president is onboard. Those jets, known as the VC-25B in military parlance, will replace the pair of modified Boeing 747s that have ferried American presidents since 1990.
The Air Force purchased a new set of aircraft—unused Boeing 747s abandoned by a bankrupt Russian airline—for $3.9 billion in 2018 after Trump criticized the cost of the replacement effort and went in search of a better deal. But Boeing has repeatedly stumbled, amassing $2.5 billion in losses amid significant delays that pushed Trump to seek another option.
“They had to strip those planes that were built for another purpose down to the studs,” Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) said at the hearing. “The contractor who was doing the interior work went out of business, and Boeing had to figure out a plan to do the fitting out of the interior of the plane.”
Now the Air Force estimates the new fleet won’t be ready until fiscal 2027 at the earliest—three years later than first expected, Darlene Costello, one of the service’s top civilian acquisition officials told lawmakers May 7.
Hoping to hit that date, the Air Force is considering paring down the requirements that the new airframes must meet to begin flying, Costello said without elaborating. It also temporarily loosened some of the security rules at the Boeing production facility to move work along.
“We’re down to a few remaining issues that we have to work through,” said Costello, then the Air Force’s principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics. “We will hope to close that in the very near future.”
While Meink said he can’t guarantee the pair of planes will be delivered in 2027, “we are doing whatever we can to pull it back.”