Jeff Wise

This article originally ran in New York magazine on June 11, 2024

If Donald Trump gets reelected in November, he’ll win a bonanza of benefits, including freedom from prison, the ability to jail Joe Biden, a $400,000 salary, and kinglike powers. He’ll also get a massive upgrade in the quality of his air travel, from his ’90s vintage 757 dubbed Trump Force One to the real Air Force One, a pair of heavily modified 747s worth billions.

To hear Trump tell it, that’s not much of an upgrade at all. He once told Rolling Stone that Air Force One is “a step down” from his 757 “in every way.”

But that’s pure delusion. Sure, Trump’s plane is big, and it has a shiny new paint job, but from a true private-jet aficionado’s point of view, those are about its only virtues. “It’s like if you wanted to brag about having a massive yacht, so you bought the Staten Island Ferry and converted it,” says a private-jet broker who prefers not to be identified. “That’s not something that people who really know yachts would find impressive.”

Trump Force One, you might say, is a poor man’s idea of a rich man’s plane — a big shiny bauble that behind the scenes is “a plane past its prime with decaying mechanics and exorbitant storage fees,” as CNN put it. Which raises the question: Why is a guy supposedly as rich as Trump is flying around in such a jalopy? According to Bloomberg, he’s worth $6.5 billion. People with this kind of wealth generally fly planes like the Gulfstream G650 or the Dassault Falcon 8X, the Porsches and Lamborghinis of the air. By comparison, Trump is flying a secondhand school bus.

It’s not really that complicated, though. To understand the crappiness of Trump’s plane, it helps to know a bit more about planes and Trump.

There was nothing particularly special-looking about the twin-engine airliner parked on the tarmac at the Singapore Airshow in February. It was white, with the usual rows of rounded windows on either side and a red-and-blue airline logo emblazoned on the tail. But though its appearance was nondescript, the aircraft represented something potentially game-changing for aviation: a long-planned, well-funded, and extremely determined attempt by China to break into the tightly sealed $400B commercial-aircraft marketplace. “They’re serious about this,” said Shukor Yusof, an aviation analyst at Endau Analytics in Singapore.

The plane on display at the airshow was the C919, a narrowbody airliner built by the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, or Comac, a state-owned manufacturer headquartered in Shanghai. Though five of the machines are now flying domestically within China, the C919’s appearance in Singapore was the first time the plane had appeared abroad and marked an important step in what is widely regarded as a long-shot bid to take on the industry’s twin Goliaths, Boeing and Airbus. 

Until recently, many would have pegged the chance of success at practically zero. But with Boeing reeling from a series of blunders over the past six years, Comac’s chances right now are looking brighter. The flying public is newly wary of Boeing’s planes, and airlines have been stymied by the company’s production bottlenecks. “The Chinese are exploiting the shortage of aircraft in the marketplace,” Yusof said.

The phone in Room 511, in a Holiday Inn off the highway in Charleston, South Carolina, rang and rang with no response. John Barnett’s attorneys were calling after their client failed to show up for his third day of deposition against his former employer, Boeing. It was Saturday, March 9, and the lawyers, Rob Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, were looking forward to getting his story on the record. Barnett had worked in the company’s South Carolina plant building 787 airliners from 2011 to 2017, during which time he’d witnessed numerous safety violations. After he took his complaints public, Barnett alleged, Boeing had punished him by denying him promotions and forcing him to retire early. By suing, he sought not only to redress his own mistreatment but also to push Boeing to revamp its safety culture. The need was urgent: Boeing’s reputation had been in free fall since the start of the year, starting with the blowout of a door plug on a brand-new 737 Max-9 over Oregon and continuing with a series of well-publicized mishaps, including an incident just the day before when a wheel fell off a 777 leaving San Francisco.

When Barnett failed to answer the phone, Turkewitz and Knowles called the hotel and asked the staff to look for his orange Dodge Ram pickup. It was sitting in the parking lot with Barnett inside, dead. His finger was still on the trigger of a silver pistol. Conspiracy theories exploded, intensifying further after a relative claimed to a local TV station that Barnett had told her that “if anything happens, it’s not suicide.” There were two ways to interpret the story: Either Boeing’s communications strategy had been expanded to include assassination, or its reputation had become so toxic that the public found it possible to believe the worst.