Air Force One’s aborted flight to Davos last week was one more stage in a prolonged failure to modernize the large jets that serve American presidents. The current airplanes have been in use for 36 years and are increasingly hard to maintain. Their aging has accelerated as President Trump makes frequent weekend trips to Palm Beach. More crucially, the program to replace them has for a long time become ensnared in the downward spiral of Boeing.
Nobody has been more aware of Boeing’s shortcomings than Trump. A month before he began his first term as president, in December 2016, he summoned Dennis Muilenburg, the former CEO of Boeing, to Mar-a-Lago to be grilled on the costs of the Air Force One program, having threatened to cancel it in a tweet.
After the meeting, Muilenburg praised Trump’s “business headset” and said he had agreed to cap the program’s costs at $4 billion. After another meeting with Trump in January 2017, Muilenburg said Boeing would “streamline the process” and achieve “substantial cost reduction.”
Muilenburg’s objectives were never met. In July 2018, the US Air Force awarded Boeing a contract to deliver two “mission-ready” presidential airplanes by 2024, fixing the price at $3.9 billion. That has since been increased to $4.3 billion, but Boeing itself has had to swallow over $2 billion in losses. Now, the first airplane is not due to be delivered until mid-2028, according to an Air Force spokesperson.
Something as intractable as this, involving a company where apparently deadlines and budgets mean nothing, arises from a kind of corporate malaise that, once contracted, seems as hard to explain as it is to shake off.
Boeing’s inability to execute in nearly nine years what should have been a precisely prescribed conversion of two Boeing 747-8 jets is seemingly inexplicable. The 747-8 is the final iteration of the legendary 747, the world’s first wide-body airliner. The original 747 went from concept to first flight in just three years. Back then, Boeing seemed unmatched in skills and esteem and the engineers who delivered the feat were dubbed the “Incredibles.” Last year, Trump put Elon Musk on the case in an effort to identify and solve the problems that Boeing was having in delivering the new jets. Soon after that, the president seized on an offer from the Qatari royal family to gift him a 747-8, adding new complications to the saga.
A tipping point occurred nine months before Muilenburg’s first meeting with Trump, on March 30, 2016, when a fateful decision was taken about the airplane that underpinned Boeing’s future profits, a new version of its venerable cash cow, the 737-MAX. This decision would lead to the most serious crisis in the company’s history and questions about its engineering integrity that still persist.
Development of the new jet had reached the stage where Boeing had to determine which changes to the cockpit airline pilots should be alerted to, particularly changes in the controls affecting its handling. These included a new software system named MCAS, but according to a House Transportation Committee investigation, on that day in 2016, Boeing’s chief technical pilot requested, and an FAA official agreed, to exclude any mention of MCAS in the new manuals guiding pilots as they adapted to the 737-MAX—even though Boeing’s own tests had shown that, in certain circumstances, MCAS was empowered to override commands from the pilots.