Although the new VC-25B carried US President Donald Trump to Turkey for the NATO summit, he left aboard one of the classic VC-25As.
After a high-profile entry into service at the start of July, US President Donald Trump has already had to curtail his use of a new Air Force One executive transport jet.
Officially known as the VC-25B Bridge aircraft, the converted 747-8 is the jet famously, or perhaps infamously, gifted to Washington by the government of Qatar. The Boeing Business Jet was then modified into a presidential transport by conversion specialist L3Harris, which delivered it to the US Air Force (USAF) in June.
The VC-25B Bridge carried Trump on a domestic trip at the start of July and flew in the Independence Day air show over Washington, DC to celebrate the semiquincentennial anniversary of the USA’s founding on 4 July.
Trump then opted for the VC-25B Bridge as his jet of choice to travel to Ankara, Turkey, to attend the annual summit of NATO leaders on 7 and 8 July.
However, the freshly painted red-white-and-blue 747 did not carry the US president for the entirety of his journey back to the United States.
Instead, one of the older, classically painted blue-and-white VC-25As assumed the Air Force One callsign and bore the presidential retinue from Turkey to RAF Mildenhall in the UK. There, Trump and his entourage swapped jets and crossed the Atlantic on the new VC-25B.
The reasons for the switch are not entirely clear.
When asked about the change in Turkey, Trump said the new VC-25B Bridge would stop at a US military base in Europe as an exposition for American troops. The president later posted a photo of the jet on the ramp at RAF Mildenhall, flanked by a number of USAF personnel and their families.
Speaking at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland after the return flight aboard the VC-25B, Trump denied that a security concern was behind the 747 shuffle.
“No, no,” Trump said on 9 July. “We sent it a little bit early so we could let them see it. The base, the whole base came out and saw the plane.”
However, media reports suggest there was in fact a serious security worry.
During the Ankara summit, Trump reopened hostilities in the Persian Gulf between the USA and Iran, declaring a tenuous ceasefire over. In light of the renewed fighting, the president’s Secret Service security detail urged him to return home on one of the VC-25As, a detail first reported by the New York Times.
No specific threat has been officially disclosed. Unverified reports are circulating, including several citing Israeli intelligence sources, that Tehran may have been planning an attack on the president in the near future.
Iran has for years been open about its desire to exact revenge on Trump for the killing of former Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020, which Trump ordered during his first term in the White House.
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also oversaw the decapitation strikes that killed Iran’s former supreme leader Ali Khamenei and several of his family members on 28 February, which kicked off a devastating bombing campaign against Iran.
A week-long, state funeral for Khameni concluded on 10 July, including processions in multiple cities across Iran and neighbouring Iraq. The events were used to rally supporters of the fundamentalist government in Tehran.
So why the aircraft change in Ankara?
The USAF declared that “no risk was taken in security, safety or mission communications” of the VC-25B Bridge when the aircraft was delivered after a 10-month conversion process.
Both the service and L3Harris assured the public that extensive precautions were also taken to clear the former Qatari jet of any espionage risk.
“The aircraft is clean and very secure,” Jason Lambert, president of L3Harris’ ISR business unit, told FlightGlobal in June, following delivery of the VC-25B.
L3Harris also provides the secure SL3CS-A communications suite that will be featured on the two primary VC-25Bs that Boeing expects to deliver in 2028, making that unlikely to be the source of the issue.
The USAF admits that the converted Bridge aircraft does not contain all of the systems included on the two purpose-built VC-25Bs being prepared by Boeing.
“The collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets that Boeing must deliver to support the next 40 years,” the USAF says.
What exactly those less commonly used systems were, and if they impacted the decision to switch planes, remains unclear.
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