It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the President who did most of his campaigning traveling in his own private branded commercial airliner has plans to revamp Air Force One. And that’s exactly what President Donald Trump is doing, according to Bloomberg. Trump unveiled a new paint job for Air Force One on ABC late last week – one that looks similar to the “TRUMP” branded jets he flew around commercially while campaigning.
He told ABC: “There’s your new Air Force One, and I’m doing this for other presidents, not for me.”
He also claimed he got $1.6 billion in savings off the price of the project, while the Air Force said that Trump negotiations with Boeing yielded $1.4 billion in savings. The Air Force is responsible for managing the $5.3 billion program for Boeing to build two new presidential plans.
But Trump’s plan is being held up in congress – an amendment to the annual defense policy bill approved by the House Armed Services Committee (H.R. 2500) would bar changes to plans for the planes.
Air Force One’s paint job isn’t the first time that Trump has intervened in defense department projects. He personally pushed for cost cuts for Air Force One and the F-35 fighter and has demanded that “the Navy use old-fashioned steam-based catapults on its new aircraft carriers instead of a more advanced but occasionally unreliable electromagnetic system.”
A final decision on the paint job will come in 2021, so the plans could be abandoned if Trump loses his re-election bid next year. Estimates put the actual production of the plane – should Trump win – at September 2024, meaning he may never even get to fly on the plane, once completed.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2MNEAb0 Tyler Durden