I don’t have much of an opinion yet about Qatar’s donation of a luxuriously appointed decommissioned 747 to the United States to serve as a temporary Air Force One.
The story, as with so many these days, is murky because everybody has an ideological axe to grind and is spinning so furiously that I am getting nauseous from dizziness. When the truth emerges from the fog of rhetoric, I expect I will have an opinion about that and it may or may not be worth commenting on it.
The scandal buried in the Qatar/Air Force One story that is easy to understand is about Boeing, which apparently is unable to deliver on its 2018 contract to deliver two refurbished 747s by 2024. Their current timeline suggests that they MAY be able to deliver them 11 years late in 2035.
What do they think they are building? A space capsule or something? Come to think of it, Boeing can’t do that either.
In his first term, Trump commissioned two new presidential planes to replace a pair of aging jets, which are among the world’s most complex aircraft with communications and defensive systems that serve as a command and control platform for the commander in chief. Boeing won the $3.9 billion contract and at one point was expected to have the planes ready by last year. But it is now years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, after a series of supplier, engineering and manufacturing setbacks.
L3Harris has been commissioned by the government to overhaul a Boeing 747, formerly used by Qatar’s government, as an interim presidential plane. Photo: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg News
L3Harris has been a contractor to Boeing working on communications systems for the pair of replacement Air Force Ones. The company, a product of the 2019 tie-up between L3 Technologies and Harris Corp., aims to become an alternative to the Pentagon’s biggest suppliers and has been growing quickly. It generates roughly one-third the annual revenue of Boeing.
The interim jet would complement the current pair of aging, heavily modified Boeing 747 jets that are known by the military as VC-25A aircraft and referred to as Air Force One when the president is on board.
Before Trump’s inauguration, White House Military Office and senior Air Force officials considered canceling Boeing’s contract for the new planes, according to people familiar with the matter. White House officials under Trump have also discussed whether they can sue the plane manufacturer, some of the people said.
The U.S. Air Force has long wanted a third jet to serve as a backup when one of the current pair is undergoing maintenance, according to people familiar with the matter.
The VC-25As date to the George H.W. Bush administration and increasingly require heavy maintenance, potentially limiting the president’s transportation options on overseas missions when one of the planes is in the shop.
Around the November elections, Boeing representatives signaled to federal officials that the plane maker wouldn’t be able to deliver the new planes for about another decade—until around 2035, according to people familiar with the discussion. Boeing has, in particular, recently struggled with the planes’ complicated wiring and structural issues, including some related to holes for doors cut into the lower lobes of the aircraft, some of these people said.
L3Harris, the same company Boeing has contracted to install the “complicated wiring” in their Air Force One replacements, is going to modify the former Qatari jet sometime this fall, doing in months what Boeing says it can’t do in over a decade.
Granted, Boeing’s task is somewhat more complicated than L3Harris’. I assume they will be installing more than communications gear into their replacement versions. But modifying two 747s, unless they are replacing the engines with perpetual motion machines, shouldn’t take as long as designing and building a modern fighter aircraft from start to finish.
The planes are built, for God’s sake. The air force can rebuild a fighter jet from two that CRASHED in less than three years, which seems pretty complicated to me.
The US Air Force calls it the “Frankenjet,” a stealth fighter stitched together from the parts of two F-35s wrecked in accidents that is now on duty and combat ready.
“’Frankenjet’” is fully operational and ready to support the warfighter,” a report from the military’s F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) said on Wednesday.
The recycled warplane traces its origins to 2014, when an F-35A about to take off on a training mission from Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base suffered “catastrophic engine failure,” according to an Air Force report on the incident.
The aircraft, known as AF-27, also sustained major damage to its rear.
Pieces of a fractured engine rotor arm “cut through the engine’s fan case, the engine bay, an internal fuel tank, and hydraulic and fuel lines before exiting through the aircraft’s upper fuselage,” an investigation concluded.
The resulting fire burned the rear two thirds of the fighter jet, it said.
Then on June 8, 2020, the nose landing gear on another F-35A, known as AF-211, failed on landing at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, resulting in severe damage to that warplane, according to reports on the incident.
So, the Air Force was left with two useable pieces of $75 million fighter jets – the nose of AF-27 and the rear of AF-211.
You can’t tell me that the Air Force can do that in two and a half years, but that Boeing needs 17 to install wiring and make modest modifications to already built 747s.
I wouldn’t want to say that Boeing’s inability to do relatively basic things is a bigger scandal than any deal Trump may have made with Qatar, but it surely is more significant when it comes to the health of our nation’s economy and defense infrastructure. Boeing is a key player in the American economy and will be building our next generation of fighter jets.
We better hope that they don’t treat that contract the same way they have Starliner or Air Force One.
