President Trump, furious about delays in delivering two new Air Force One jets, has empowered Elon Musk to explore drastic options to prod Boeing to move faster, including relaxing security clearance standards for some who work on the presidential planes.
His administration has even discussed whether a luxury jet could be acquired and refitted during the wait, according to five people with knowledge of the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe closely held deliberations.
Mr. Musk, whom Mr. Trump has tapped to slash the federal government, has been central to the discussions — consulting with the military, the White House and Boeing, the people said.
Mr. Trump regards Boeing as almost a lost cause, according to people close to him. He often laments how far the company has fallen, wondering aloud what happened to the jet maker and why it seems incapable of building things anymore.
The two heavily modified Boeing 747s currently used interchangeably to fly the president are more than 30 years old and require extensive servicing. Mr. Trump views Air Force One as a symbol of power and prestige, and he is infuriated that he begins his second term flying around in the same aging planes that once transported President George H.W. Bush.
His public comments took on a more ominous tone in an interview broadcast Tuesday night on Fox News’s “Hannity.” Seated beside Mr. Musk, the president excoriated the company, saying, “I mean, they are actually in default, Boeing,” before adding: “They’ve been building this thing forever. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Mr. Trump, in a pointed demonstration about his willingness to explore other options, took time on Saturday to kick the tires on a luxury jet sitting at Palm Beach International Airport. Photographers spotted the tail number of the late model 747-8, which revealed the plane to have been owned, at least until recently, by the Qatari royal family, according to registration data.
It is unclear whether any of these options will come to fruition. But depending on how extensive the pullback would be for lowering security requirements, the cost of speeding the production schedule for the new planes could be to compromise the president’s safety, or the nation’s security, if not managed with extreme care. Boeing executives have argued that there is a safe way to do this, by lowering the security standards for certain classes of workers who do not touch the airplanes’ most sensitive systems.
The Air Force has already contractually committed to paying Boeing $3.5 billion of the $4.3 billion total set aside for the project. But Boeing is at least three years behind schedule and has already booked $2.4 billion in losses on the contract. Decisions made during Mr. Trump’s first term in office are themselves a factor in the delay, said recently departed Air Force officials who helped run the program.
Boeing’s contract to build the new planes was first signed in 2018, and the planes were originally expected to be delivered in 2024.
A Boeing spokeswoman declined to answer questions, writing in a statement, “We don’t have anything to share.”
Boeing’s executives have indicated to the government that they might not be able to deliver the new Air Force Ones until the end of Mr. Trump’s second term. But Mr. Musk, who is known for setting aggressive — in some cases unachievable — deadlines at his companies, has insisted that at least one of the planes can be delivered within a year’s time.
Officials involved in the project — a complicated feat of engineering that requires the plane to be capable of evading certain missile attacks or surviving the fallout from a nuclear blast — regard Mr. Musk’s timeline as unrealistic.
The president has told associates that if Mr. Musk can fly a rocket, he can probably figure out an airplane.
But Mr. Musk’s role in this endeavor adds to the tally of the many conflicts of interest he now has with the federal government. Mr. Musk has more than $2.4 billion in contracts awarded in the past two years with the Air Force, and his SpaceX rocket company competes directly with Boeing’s aerospace division.
Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said in response to questions from The New York Times: “It is ridiculous the delivery of a new Air Force One airplane has been delayed for such a long time. President Trump is working on identifying ways to speed up the delivery of a new plane, which has been needed for a while.”
An Airborne Command Center
Some of the more radical alternatives that senior administration officials have offered to simply waiting on the tardy Boeing jets, such as retrofitting the Qatari jet within a year’s time, have been described by current and former Pentagon officials as impractical. A temporary plane that could be certified and converted to be mission ready as an Air Force One could still take years, they said.
While technically any Air Force aircraft transporting the president is given the designation of Air Force One, in common parlance it refers to the bespoke jets designed to carry the commander in chief. Air Force One is not only a way for the president to travel and a familiar avatar of the U.S. leadership; it is also an airborne command center from which the president, at times of crisis, can steer the nation through wars or responses to attacks, even potentially a nuclear strike.
Mr. Trump’s personal plane — which went through a significant upgrade after his first term — has gold plating throughout, including on the seatbelt buckles. He often asks passengers whether they prefer his plane, which he calls “Trump Force One,” and his guests invariably say yes.
Mr. Trump also thinks the Kennedy-era robin’s egg blue and white exterior should be updated with a bolder red, white and blue design.
While President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had relatively little interest in Boeing’s progress and the project lagged during his administration, Boeing now has to contend with a president who is impatient, bordering on obsessive. During his four years out of power, Mr. Trump kept a model of the new Air Force One at his office at Mar-a-Lago.
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have expressed their frustrations in a series of phone calls with the jet maker’s chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, dating back to November, soon after Mr. Trump’s election victory.
“The president wants the airplane sooner, and so we’re working with Elon and the team to figure what can we do to pull up the schedule of that aircraft,” Mr. Ortberg said in a CNBC interview in late January.
Yankee White Security Clearance
Mr. Musk has told Mr. Trump that the designs for the new Air Force Ones have been over-engineered with unnecessary features that have slowed the production, the people familiar said.
Both Mr. Musk and Boeing have privately advocated removing the top-level security clearance requirements for at least some of the people involved.
Currently, nearly everyone who works on the project requires a high-level security clearance called Yankee White, which requires a level of vetting equal to what military personnel must undergo if they are to interact with the president or the vice president. That includes Boeing employees and contractors, from mechanics to the electricians, even those who do not work on sophisticated systems.
Lowering the security clearance standards would speed up the manufacturing process, making it easier for Boeing to find workers. But it could also expose the project to national security risks, such as espionage by spies posing as employees. Officials involved in the discussions are contemplating the option for only some of the employees who do not work on the most secure parts.
Mr. Musk has also questioned the amount of time needed for flight testing of the planes, according to three people with knowledge of his private comments.
Some current and former Pentagon officials are concerned that Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Musk’s press for speed might compromise the safety requirements for a vital national security asset.
“The requirements could be scrubbed down and more risk can be assumed,” Frank Kendall, the Biden-era Air Force secretary who recently left his post, said in an interview. “But you can also go too far. You do need to have the basic command and control capabilities and communications capabilities on the airplane.”
A Boeing Debacle
Mr. Trump is hardly the first federal official to express frustration with Boeing’s handling of the Air Force One contract, as there have been a series of snafus and delays since the company was first selected for the job a decade ago. Mr. Kendall said he was so exasperated with Boeing that he considered canceling the contract.
When asked if cancellation was legally possible, Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokeswoman, said, “Every contract has an option for cancellation.”
The Pentagon last year hired a different contractor, Sierra Nevada Corp., to convert 747 jets into so-called doomsday planes to allow the military to continue operations even during a nuclear war. The $13 billion deal means there is already another alternative contractor that could potentially handle the Air Force One conversion, one former Pentagon official involved in the project said. Sierra Nevada has ties with Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, which has sent Sierra Nevada satellite components to orbit.
Andrew Hunter, who recently stepped down from his role as Air Force assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said in an interview that late last year, before Mr. Trump returned to power, he ordered Air Force One program managers to work with the Federal Aviation Administration and the White House to look for ways to accelerate delivery of the planes, now set for 2028 or even 2029.
It was Mr. Trump who negotiated the original contract with Boeing, an agreement that included extensive demands for specialized security and communications equipment, some of which Mr. Trump’s team is now talking about scaling back.
Mr. Trump’s fixed-price contract also gave the Air Force less ability to make quick changes in the project as it encountered problems.
Boeing is retrofitting two planes it had already built for a Russian buyer that went out of business, instead of doing a custom build for the Air Force before the 747 production line ended in 2022. A custom build might have helped avoid some of the time associated with rewiring and reconfiguring the plane, one executive involved in the project said.
Mr. Trump has also stuck with his preferred red, white and blue color scheme even after engineers determined that the dark blue paint created thermal issues and the Pentagon reverted to a lighter color scheme.
The Air Force One project is considered a debacle inside Boeing, a company already reeling from a cascade of other disasters. Boeing has endured six consecutive years of losses, crashes that killed hundreds of passengers and a strike that added to what were already serious production delays.
The company has battled multiple public relations disasters on the Air Force One project, such as when company officials discovered that security clearances had lapsed for many of their workers and when empty tequila bottles were found on one of the planes under development. The coronavirus pandemic made it more difficult to find suitable workers, and the project was delayed further when one of Boeing’s key suppliers for the airplanes’ interiors fell behind schedule, resulting in a lawsuit.
Tiny cracks in the structures of the two planes also had to be repaired, again delaying the job, even though the planes provided by Boeing had never been used for commercial flights. This is a flaw often found in the 747-8 model, according to the F.A.A.
An Unorthodox Visit
In December, Mr. Hunter and Mr. Kendall were notified that Mr. Musk planned to view the Boeing facility in San Antonio and they were involved in getting him approval to make this unorthodox visit, as Mr. Musk was neither a federal government official nor a Boeing employee at the time.
“That would not have happened in any other transition process,” Mr. Hunter said.
Mr. Musk, during this visit, was looking for ways to speed production, one former Pentagon official involved in the deliberations said.
“The idea was that we could just strip out a lot of the military stuff, just give the president a good-looking new airplane to fly in with commercial capabilities and maybe some minimal military upgrades,” the former Pentagon official said.
One impediment is the requirements that Mr. Trump and the White House set for the Boeing plane in 2018, Mr. Hunter said.
“If you don’t like the requirements, change them,” he said in the interview with The Times.
Mr. Trump’s inspection on Saturday of a Boeing 747-8 that had been flown to the Palm Beach airport seemed intended, in part, to poke at Boeing.
“This highlights the project’s failure to deliver a new Air Force One on time as promised,” Mr. Cheung, the White House communications director, said while Mr. Trump was visiting the 12-year-old plane.
The plane Mr. Trump visited is operated by a company called Global Jet. An executive for the company, Aubry Perrin, confirmed that after Mr. Trump’s tour, the jet returned to Doha, Qatar. Mr. Perrin said that he could not disclose the current owner, but that it is privately owned and not available for charters.
No explanation has been offered by the Trump White House for how the United States would take control of the Qatari airplane, or who would pay for it. The 747-8 planes typically sell for about $400 million, according to Corporate Jet Investor.
Converting the Qatari plane to operate as Air Force One could still take several years, two former Pentagon officials who have worked on the Air Force One program said, unless Mr. Trump was to order that military communications and related military defenses for the airplane be significantly scaled back.
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