Trump plane shopping in March 2025.
Air Force One Delay Sends Trump Plane Shopping
Trump shows interest in buying a Qatari-owned 747 while Boeing struggles. March 27, 2025
The delays have led Trump to start looking elsewhere for a new plane, and his eye has fallen on a Qatari-owned 747 dripping in the kind of gilded, leather-swathed luxury that the former real estate developer is known to crave.
On Feb. 15 the plane touched down in West Palm Beach, Florida—a 10-minute drive from Trump’s redoubt at Mar-a-Lago—after flying overnight from Qatar. A few hours later, Trump ascended the stairs for a closer look at the lightly used jet with opulent cabins worthy of a superyacht.
The tour lasted 72 minutes, the White House calendar shows, before the president deplaned for a round of golf. The visit demonstrated his willingness to break with protocol and consider an interim plane—with a foreign pedigree at that. “I’m not happy with Boeing,” Trump told reporters aboard the current Air Force One a few days after the tour. “We may do something else. We may go and buy a plane.”
The Qatari model—a 747-8, the final version produced by Boeing before it ended production in 2023—is one of them, according to people who’ve asked not to be identified as the proceedings are confidential. The jet might be available at the kind of knockdown price the president is fond of. “There’s not a lot of affinity for used 747s,” Foley says. “They’re not as expensive as you might think.”
The plane was built in 2012 and delivered to Qatar Amiri Flight, which manages aircraft for the country’s ruling family, though more recently it’s been operated by a different company, according to the Cirium Ascend Consultancy.
The asking price isn’t known, but the plane would likely sell for $75 million to $100 million, Cirium says, while the interior, completed a decade ago, could add on $25 million more. The base price would roughly equal that of a smaller, late-model Gulfstream, but that’s because the jumbo’s four engines consume about $12,000 worth of kerosene per hour of flying time—almost eight times as much as a Gulfstream.
What’s not clear: why the White House would kick the tires on a jet that’s the pinnacle of luxury while it trumpets its efforts to slash government waste. And it’s far from certain how the acquisition of the Qatari plane would be funded—or even if Trump is seriously pursuing it, with some saying it’s simply a negotiating tactic to push Boeing to pick up the pace. “There’s absolutely no reason the current Air Force One would not soldier on,” says Richard Aboulafia, a managing director with consulting firm AeroDyanmic Advisory.
“It’s a manufactured crisis.”https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-03-26/boeing-s-air-force-one-delay-has-trump-looking-at-747-from-qatar
