SO, WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Riding Air Force One can be the thrill of a lifetime. Nearly every first-time guest, no matter how sophisticated, experiences a certain kid-in-a-candy-store awe.
Recalls journalist Hedrick Smith, a former New York Times correspondent: “Coming back from an economic summit meeting in Canada aboard Air Force One for an interview with Reagan, I remember being impressed by the high-backed luxury-style seats and a signal corps operator asking, ‘Where would you like to call, sir?’ Mentally, I imagined the click of military heels coming to attention at the other end of the line. Like an overawed tourist, I scooped up souvenirs: matchboxes, napkins, swizzle sticks, any item embossed with the presidential seal.”
There are many theories about why it’s so special. “It’s almost a mythical place,” says historian Doug Brinkley, who found flying aboard Air Force One more “awe inspiring” than visiting the White House. “The White House is no longer a residency. Hordes of people are turnstiling through, and there are endless photo ops. You feel much more privileged to be on Air Force One.” And in that rarified atmosphere, visitors tend to bond with the president more intensely than anywhere else.
“The entire government of the United States is there in microcosm,” says Stan Greenberg, who was President Clinton’s pollster (and phoned his mother from the plane on his first trip). “The president is there with all his command authority and the infrastructure to wage war. You do things that are frivolous, like watch a movie, but you do it in the confines of this great concentration of power. And when you meet a president on Air Force One it’s much more personal.”
Greenberg explains that having an audience with the president in the Oval Office is less impressive because there is a pervasive sense that bodyguards, secretaries, senior-staff members, and others are ready to walk in at any moment. And the president is almost always rushed, with another appointment waiting in the wings. “On Air Force One you feel you’re really there with him alone,” Greenberg says in an observation shared by scores of people interviewed for this book. “There’s something more intimate about it.”
“For friends and supporters of the president, it’s a very potent symbol of friendship, persuasion, and conciliation,” adds Bill Galston, a political scientist and former White House adviser to Clinton. “For most people, it’s a thrill. And when you come back you can share souvenirs of your trip on Air Force One—that’s the coin of the realm.” (Galston came away with an Air Force One notepad, which he still has at home.)
“Its role as a functioning, mobile White House should not be underestimated,” the political scientist says. “It’s a lot more conducive to work there than in the West Wing. You don’t have phones ringing. You don’t have people running in and out of your office.
“By White House standards it was luxurious. You felt pampered,” Galston says. He tells a common tale: “You walk on Air Force One for the first time and you have to pinch yourself. You’re feeling, ‘Who am I to merit this?’ I asked myself, ‘How the hell did I get here?’ Twenty years earlier I was an assistant professor teaching Plato and Aristotle. It was an existential experience.”
• • •
THE AIRCRAFT HAS become so famous that virtually every American is familiar with it. Asked to name the plane that the president flies on, 78 percent of adults correctly identified Air Force One, according to a survey conducted in mid-2002 for this book by pollster Frank Luntz. Only 17 percent didn’t know or refused to respond, and 4.5 percent gave other answers.
More than 82 percent of men correctly identified Air Force One, as did 74 percent of women. Frequent commercial travelers had an even higher recognition rate. Eighty-three percent of those who considered themselves “very likely” to take a trip in the next year correctly identified the president’s plane.
For the first time, Luntz turned up evidence from survey research to demonstrate the aircraft’s mystique and glamour. Asked how they would prefer to travel from the United States to Europe, Americans put Air Force One on a par with the Queen Elizabeth 2 luxury cruise ship. About 38 percent of Americans said they would like to sail on the QE2, and 31 percent preferred Air Force One.
The mystique grows with a person’s age. People between 50 and 64 were equally split, with 34 percent preferring to travel on Air Force One and 34 percent preferring the cruise ship—although women over age 50 chose Air Force One over the QE2 by 37 percent to 33 percent. Men over age 50 were evenly split at 32.7 percent. Those over age 65, both men and women, favored the president’s plane, 36.5 percent to 31.4 percent.
In a separate survey for this book conducted by pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, 66 percent of Americans had a favorable impression of Air Force One, and only 4 percent had an unfavorable impression; the rest had no opinion or weren’t sure. Asked to describe their feelings about the plane, the most common impression was that it was a symbol of the country and a reminder of history. Many volunteered that Lyndon Johnson was sworn in aboard the plane after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Others remembered that George W. Bush began to direct the war on terrorism from Air Force One in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
IN THE MODERN presidency, two types of plane have stood out. The first was the sleek 707 used for three decades, with various modifications, by Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. It was the most modern jet in commercial use when it was introduced as the primary presidential aircraft in 1959, and carried 18 crew members and up to 50 passengers, including staff members, guests, Secret Service agents, and a handful of reporters and photographers called the press pool. It was capable of flying at 650 miles per hour but generally cruised at 580 mph with a range of 4,500 miles. The range gradually was increased to more than 7,000 miles. The journalists, then as now, were tucked into their own compartment so the president and his aides could avoid media snooping.
The second plane is the one in use today, a 747 jumbo jet that debuted with George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990. The 747 is a big improvement over the old 707 in various ways. For one thing, the jumbo jet can fly much farther without refueling; it has a range of 9,600 miles, a maximum cruising altitude of 45,100 feet, a cruising speech of 600 mph, and a maximum speed of 701 mph. That means it can travel nonstop all the way from Washington to Tokyo, for example. This saves the president lots of time, and has all but eliminated the need for trans-Pacific refueling stops.
The communications also are much improved, with added access to the Internet and to telephone service. There are 87 phones that can connect the president and all the passengers to nearly anyone in the world. The plane holds two pilots, a navigator, and flight engineer, a total of 26 crew members, and 76 passengers.
Journalist Hedrick Smith describes the huge entourage that has traveled with the president for many years, on the primary aircraft and several backup planes: “300 to 400 government officials: the President’s senior staff plus echelons of policy advisers, negotiators, communiqué drafters, military aides, doctors, stewards, personal valets, even the first lady’s hairdresser; plus several cabinet members with their lieutenants, specialists, secretaries, spokesmen, and miscellaneous handlers; and a phalanx of as many as 100 Secret Service agents ready to form a human wall, if need be, to insure the President’s physical safety.”
On major trips, a thousand pieces of luggage must be loaded and unloaded at each stop, transported to hotels, distributed to rooms, then brought back to the planes for departure. Finally, there is a separately chartered plane for the press (paid for on a prorated basis by the traveling journalists), which generally holds from 20 to several hundred reporters, editors, photographers, and technicians, and another dozen White House staff members and stenographers, depending on media interest in a particular trip.
Referring to Reagan’s days on the 707, Smith offers an observation that remains true today: “When the president travels, the ‘access itch,’ the urge to be physically close to the president, becomes acute. The fewer people who can fit into a plane, a helicopter, a presidential limousine, the more competitive the inner circle becomes… . Long trips touch off a power scramble for choice seating on Air Force One.”
AMONG THE MOST frequent of the frequent fliers are the media, specifically the rotating Air Force One pool of a dozen reporters and photographers who occupy the rear cabin. As a veteran of some 200 Air Force One flights over 17 years of covering the presidency, I can say that it’s still a thrill to ride the big plane, but we in the press compartment really have little or no idea what is happening on the aircraft.
George W. Bush, for instance, approved the details of his proposal to create a new Department of Homeland Security, to fight terrorism, on a flight to Berlin in 2002. This would have been a huge story, but the reporters on the plane never had a clue until Bush announced the specifics weeks later. As is described later in this book, Bush also has held at least one Christian prayer service on the plane, opening himself up to charges of crossing the line between church and state—unbeknownst to his traveling press corps.
The biggest problem is that reporters can’t leave the press cabin and go forward to the staff areas without an escort. This means the journalists are totally dependent for information on the press secretary and other officials who might come back to the media den. Presidents generally don’t bother to talk to reporters on the plane because they could find themselves in an uncontrolled environment. There are exceptions. Now and then, for example, Bill Clinton would make news on the plane. But as a rule, the spoon feedings served to the media from the briefers tend to be totally self-serving and with minimum news value.
SECURITY AND SAFETY MEASURES have always been paramount. Even the initial construction phase of the current 747 was carefully monitored. Security and technical officials patrolled the production lines at Boeing, the manufacturer, to make sure a spy did not imbed explosive devices or listening or jamming devices in the air frame, with the capability of triggering them months or years later.
Maintenance is rigorous. The jet engines are changed much more frequently than those on commercial flights, and fresh tires—not the recaps routinely used by the airlines—are the rule. The crew regularly takes the 747 and its backup on test flights to make sure the planes are in top form and to run through emergency procedures, such as what to do in case of a fire, a blown engine, or a terrorist attack.
Everyday precautions are scrupulous. The planes are guarded around the clock, even in their mammoth hangar at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. When the planes are parked in open areas outside Andrews, a roped-off security perimeter is set up around each aircraft, and it is constantly patrolled. Even the fuel is guarded, as are the refueling trucks. In addition, Air Force specialists analyze the fuel before it is pumped into Air Force One to check for contaminants and other foreign substances.
Secret Service officials consider takeoffs and landings the most dangerous times because of the risk of shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles, or snipers with high-powered rifles. The danger is considered greater now because of suicidal terrorists.
As a result, before takeoffs and landings, a duty officer from base operations and a senior Secret Service agent make a sweep of the runway either on foot or in a van, looking for debris, explosives, or anything suspicious. At Andrews, agents shut the gates to the tarmac when Air Force One is about to depart; traffic is stopped in the vicinity of the terminal (and sometimes on the entire base if there is a special alert), and aircraft movement on the field is halted. Security teams with dogs patrol near the taxiways. Officers armed with sniper rifles and other weapons are stationed around the field at predetermined posts. Fire trucks, ambulances, and other rescue equipment stand ready.
The president’s routine for reaching the aircraft is firmly established, and it is heavily dictated by security concerns.
He almost always leaves the White House from the South Lawn in his green-and-white Marine One helicopter (although a motorcade is used in bad weather), triggering a variety of activities at Andrews, a 10-minute chopper flight away.
As Marine One lifts off, a steward aboard Air Force One makes an announcement over the onboard public-address system: “We have a departure. The president is ten minutes out.” This is a signal for the crew to make final arrangements for the arrival, for the staff to walk down the stairs of the plane to greet their boss, and for the traveling reporters and photographers to stand under the left wing in case he makes remarks or suffers a mishap, such as falling down the stairs (as Gerald Ford did on a trip to Salzburg in 1975).
When Marine One touches down about 100 yards from Air Force One and begins taxiing up to the president’s jet, its engines now roaring, the steward announces, “We have an arrival.” The chopper will approach to within about 100 feet of the front of the plane, the door will fly open, and the president will descend a short flight of stairs. He will either salute the Marine guard standing at rigid attention at the base of the small staircase or walk directly to Air Force One with an aide or the commander of the air base. This scenario is familiar to anyone who watches television news coverage of the White House.
The president’s staff will walk a few discreet steps behind him so they are not shown in photographs. The president, often accompanied by the First Lady, will greet any dignitaries who have shown up, then walk up the long staircase to a small platform at the top, where he will turn and wave. Sometimes this ritual seems bizarre when there is no crowd to watch him depart. In that case, he will gesture happily to the buildings or to the reporters and photographers who record his movements—all to get that familiar wave on the evening news or the front pages.
Secret Service agents are trained to think in terms of providing 360 degrees of protection for the president, creating sectors of increasingly tight security from an outer ring to an inner ring. “It forces the assassin, we hope, to go through a lot of hoops,” says retired Secret Service agent Jerry Parr. “That means he’s liable to get caught.”
The protection extends of course to presidential motorcades. Two or three identical armor-plated black limousines are used, and no outsider can be sure which one the president will enter. The others are used as decoys. Orange masking tape in an X is placed on the tarmac precisely where the pilot is supposed to position the nose of Air Force One. Agents will then park the primary limousine with its door open near the base of the front stairs so the president can board immediately. The limos are always placed between the president and any crowd, as a buffer in case of attack.
A presidential motorcade can consist of 40 or 50 vehicles, including security cars, staff cars, VIP vehicles, press cars and vans, and an ambulance and local police escorts. Of particular note is a black Suburban with tinted windows called the “war wagon.” Inside is a heavily armed counter-assault team of agents, clad in black, trained to “attack and destroy” anyone who tries to harm the president.
As a general rule, other aircraft can’t land on or take off from the same runway as Air Force One for 15 or 20 minutes before the president’s plane arrives or departs, no matter where he is. Sometimes this also applies to adjacent runways or entire airports—a big reason why officials at some large airports don’t want the big presidential jet to land there. It’s just too disruptive of their normal operations, and his motorcade tends to hopelessly snarl traffic on local roads. Years ago, for example, presidents stopped routinely flying into New York’s busy John F. Kennedy Airport for precisely these reasons. Now, when a president goes to New York City, he usually lands in Newark, New Jersey, a short helicopter ride from Manhattan.
Air Force One is never delayed by air traffic; it is always cleared immediately for takeoff and landing because, according to Federal Aviation Administration regulations, the president comes first. Bill Clinton abused this privilege by getting a haircut on the tarmac in Los Angeles early in his first term; and while his aides insist he didn’t delay commercial flights (a dubious proposition), he easily could have, and that insensitivity was the problem. The “Haircut Incident” showed how isolating the atmosphere on Air Force One can be and how presidents often believe that whatever they do on board is beyond challenge or reproach.
Air Force One also gets cleared more easily to avoid bad weather. When the pilot and his crew detect storms or turbulence, they generally fly around or over them, a luxury that is often not available to commercial jets because their flight paths are more strictly controlled. Still, there are cases when unexpected turbulence shakes the plane and sends the crockery and an unbuckled passenger or two flying; that’s a part of air travel that not even a president can avoid.
Sometimes other aircraft go off course and fly too close. This has happened a surprising number of times over the years. Just after midnight on May 27, 1997, for example, a Paris-bound Air Force One with President Clinton on board was over the Atlantic, 213 miles west of Shannon, Ireland, when UPS Flight 6080, a 747 cargo jet, came within about two miles horizontally and 1,000 feet vertically of the president’s plane. This was too close for comfort and a violation of FAA rules. And on October 12, 1988, Air Force One with President Reagan aboard came within 1.58 miles of a Bar Harbor Airlines commuter plane as both were landing at Newark Airport. In each case, pilot error or mistakes by air controllers were blamed. But there apparently has never been a near collision, according to Air Force sources.
Despite the potential for tragedy, the Air Force resists sending fighter escorts with the president’s plane wherever he goes. It’s very expensive and, more important, it’s considered too dangerous on routine flights in the already crowded skies. Escorts are more common in international air space where there is little traffic or in potentially hostile situations.
The plane has a special “skin” designed to harden it against electromagnetic pulses that could knock out its communications and navigational systems in the case of a nuclear attack. And it contains a highly classified system of defensive countermeasures designed to ward off heat-seeking missiles. For example, White House sources say that handheld, portable, shoulder-mounted Stingers and other types of missiles can be deflected by using chaff, flares, and other types of protective systems. This equipment is positioned to face the rear (where incoming missiles would presumably home in on the jet) and mounted above each of the plane’s four engines and underneath the plane’s fuselage. Apparently, these systems have never been used.
A 747 called the “Doomsday Plane” frequently accompanies Air Force One and is often parked near where the president lands, although it is rarely seen. This aircraft is packed with ultrasensitive communications equipment and military hardware and is designed to serve as a mobile command post in case of a catastrophic attack, particularly nuclear war. It can fly for longer periods of time and at higher altitudes than the regular Air Force One, and, like the primary 747, can be refueled in the air. Yet it has never been used by a commander in chief during a crisis, and some government officials believe the Doomsday Plane has outlived its usefulness. With the communications and security systems on Air Force One being updated continuously, there will come a time in the near future when the Doomsday Plane will not offer anything special to the president that he can’t find on his regular aircraft.
Just as important, if the commander in chief ever boarded the Doomsday Plane, it might set off a panic. That was one reason President George W. Bush never flew on it during the crisis of September 11, 2001. The distinctive white Doomsday Plane was, in fact, parked within sight of Air Force One at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska when Bush landed there on September 11. White House officials considered transferring the president to that plane but nixed the idea. “We were very concerned about how that would have looked to the public,” admits a senior White House official. “It might have scared people.”
Air Force One has been the target of many bomb threats over the years. But most of them are ignored today because the security procedures—which include checking off each passenger’s name on a manifest upon boarding and repeated inspections of baggage—are so thorough that they can’t be easily penetrated. At least security officials hope so. Searching all the luggage and other onboard items of passengers is so disruptive and time-consuming that only a severe, credible threat would trigger such a response.
IN A LITTLE-KNOWN episode of the cold war, Air Force One was, for a while, equipped as a spy plane. In 1959, Allen Dulles, director of Central Intelligence, ordered his operatives to secretly install extremely sensitive cameras in the wheel wells under the 707’s belly, which could be exposed to the ground during flight when doors opened up in the front of the wheel wells. The cameras were capable of photographing points at a great distance with very high clarity. “We could read license plates on the ground from twenty-nine thousand feet,” said Ralph Albertazzie, a veteran Air Force aviator who served as Richard Nixon’s presidential pilot and is intimately familiar with the plane’s history.
Known as Project Lida Rose, the goal was to take photos of military installations, such as missile sites and air-defense bases, during President Dwight Eisenhower’s planned trip to the Soviet Union in 1960. It was gamed out to such an extent that the CIA assumed a Soviet navigator would be allowed in the cockpit during Ike’s scheduled trip, as a concession to Kremlin security and to help the Americans get where they were going in the super-secret U.S.S.R. As a result of this expectation, the equipment was designed to be operated surreptitiously by the copilot. He would use a false air vent or gasper unit just below waist level near his seat to adjust the cameras, guided by tiny lights on the control panel mounted at such an angle that only the copilot could see them. Using this system, the CIA concluded, thousands of spy photos could be taken during the trip, and the Soviet navigator would be none the wiser.
It was all apparently installed without Eisenhower’s knowledge, according to past crew members. Yet the system was never used, says Albertazzie. Eisenhower’s trip to the U.S.S.R. was cancelled amid recriminations over the downing of the American U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960.
After President John F. Kennedy took office in January 1961, the reconnaissance cameras were removed. At that point, the spying gambit was considered too risky because the Russians would have been furious if they ever found out, and relations with the Kremlin were bad enough as it was. Yet U.S. officials suspected that the Kremlin had used the same technique on Soviet planes when they traveled in the United States and other Western countries.
For many years, when Air Force One flew across the Atlantic or Pacific, the military arranged for Coast Guard or Navy ships to patrol along the route. Vessels were strung along the vast expanse of water at 250-mile intervals in a long picket line, all of them in radio contact with the president’s plane in case a rescue was needed. Vessels at coastal bases were alerted in case they had to join a search, and Coast Guard ships transmitted weather data to the Air Force One pilot when he approached their sectors.
But this elaborate system of oceanic escorts became obsolete in the late 1970s. Arranging such a huge armada of ships was no longer needed after the Air Force created a fleet of rescue airplanes—called “Duck Butts”—that were specially modified cargo aircraft carrying life rafts, rescue supplies, and medical teams. These planes would either accompany Air Force One or be ready to take off from various military bases at a moment’s notice. The rescue squads were trained to parachute into the sea to assist survivors if the president’s plane had to ditch and as rescue vessels proceeded to the scene.
A form of this system, combining air and sea elements in case of a disaster over the ocean, is still used today.
Finally, U.S. aircraft carriers, battleships, destroyers, and other large ships are often deployed as close to a president’s flight path as possible to serve as emergency hospitals. Such vessels have more elaborate medical facilities than Air Force One, and the president could be treated on board if circumstances warranted.
JUST AS REMARKABLE as the security setup is the backup system that supports the president in all his travels. He takes with him all his ground vehicles, including two or three armored black limousines and his Marine One helicopter if a chopper trip will be necessary. Also accompanying him, in one or more giant Air Force C-130 cargo planes, are communications gear and other cars, and modified vans and recreational vehicles for the Secret Service.
Service leaders believe this system is more reliable and safer than leasing vehicles and other equipment. As a result, the president generally travels with two or three huge support planes, cargo aircraft, and a press plane.
In addition, a vast network of advance workers supports his travel even before he starts. They visit every place he will visit, and try to trace every step he will take so that all goes smoothly.
SAFETY IS ALSO the first priority in more mundane matters, including food and beverage service. The flight attendants are responsible for making sure that nothing on Air Force One will cause a problem, even an upset stomach, for the commander in chief. “We make sure that anything that could be consumed in any way, shape, or fashion has not been tampered with,” says former chief steward Howie Franklin. The flight crew receives an itinerary from the White House and determines how many meals or snacks are needed for each day of a trip. Then the flight attendants propose a menu and submit it to the White House Mess, partly to avoid redundancy. “We wouldn’t want to serve salmon when the president had salmon the night before,” Franklin told me.
The stewards do their shopping in civilian clothes at different markets around the Washington region. “We do it incognito and very low key,” Franklin says. “We never want it to be predictable. That’s the best security you can get. If they don’t know you’re coming, they can’t prepare for you.”
The 747 has brought Air Force One into a new world of food service, not a small consideration in an era when the president is airborne so much of the time. Not only are today’s two full galleys more sophisticated than the two small kitchens on the 707, allowing more foods to be prepared fresh, but the refrigeration facilities are far more extensive.
In the era of the 707—from 1959 to 1990—the stewards lugged gray ice chests on board containing dry ice for frozen foods. These chests supplemented the two three-foot-by-three-foot refrigerators, one in the front kitchen and one aft. It was a serious challenge to maintain sufficient supplies of dry ice on long foreign trips to places where it was difficult to come by; the crew sometimes obtained supplies from U.S. Embassies and military facilities. “Keeping food on the 707 was an incredible task,” Franklin says.
And the food service was a source of constant complaint. When Gerald Ford went to China in 1975, TV personality Barbara Walters flew on Air Force One and was not pleased when the stewards served her the dinner of the day—stuffed pork chops, which she spurned as too heavy. A flight attendant returned a few minutes later with a deli sandwich, and she was so displeased that she complained about the food on television. Franklin recalls the incident with a laugh. The stewards didn’t want to buy perishable ingredients in the local Chinese markets because they weren’t sure the quality and health criteria were adequate.
Today, the crew can store enough food and beverages on Air Force One to serve everyone three full meals a day for two weeks. “It makes a big difference,” says Tim Kerwin, the former chief flight steward who designed the 747’s food-service system. “We can assure that all the food is from the United States. We don’t have to get food in foreign countries,” where it might not be up to American standards.
For years, the tradition has been to bill White House staff members—and the president, First Lady, and their families and guests—for their meals on the plane. The cost of an average breakfast is $4 to $6; lunch, $6 to $8; and dinner, $8 to $11. The effort to hold down costs is one reason why the meals aboard Air Force One are hardly gourmet fare; no one wants to spend a lot of money on them.
Particularly during the Bush and Clinton eras, the presidents and First Ladies have insisted on more low-fat meals and have preferred bottled water or diet soda rather than sugary soft drinks or alcohol, all for health reasons. Under Ford and Carter, for example, breakfast would often be scrambled eggs with cream cheese, hefty sausages, fried hash brown potatoes, a biscuit or danish, and a small fruit cup. Today, breakfast on board tends toward bran muffins, cereal, fresh fruit, and yogurt.
In President Johnson’s day, in the 1960s, the staff would stock up on Fresca and other soft drinks rather than risk his thundering wrath if they ran out. Still, they sometimes ran dry because the facilities for storage and refrigeration were relatively primitive by twenty-first-century standards. These days, a president can have just about any food or drink he likes, at any time of the day or night.
There is one galley for the president and his staff at midship and another galley for lesser lights in the rear of the plane. The military stewards, chosen for their affability and work ethic, will go to great lengths to please their boss and anticipate his wishes—bringing in Texas barbecue for George W. Bush when he returns to Washington from his ranch in Crawford, just as they stocked jelly beans for Ronald Reagan and juicy steaks for Lyndon Johnson.
In fact, the dining habits of the presidents amount to a rich story in and of itself. George H. W. Bush banned broccoli from Air Force One as a sort of late-in-life rebellion because he hated the taste and smell of the mineral-rich vegetable, and his mother used to make him eat it when he was a boy. Bill Clinton started out eating junk food—burgers, fries, tacos, and the like. But because of the advice of his doctors, and because he was concerned about his ballooning weight, by the end of his second term he was quite a healthy eater, consuming lots of chicken, fish, fresh vegetables, and salads. George W. Bush eats anything put before him, but he prefers Tex-Mex items such as burritos and fajitas, and he loves Asian food.
The White House provides a list to the Air Force One crew of every new president’s likes and dislikes. The list also includes a rundown of the commander in chief’s health problems, allergies, and anything else the crew might find helpful in serving him.
“Every president that I worked for was interested in his weight,” says Franklin, who served Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. “They were all interested in eating low-calorie diets. President Ford’s favorite thing was cottage cheese with A-1 steak sauce. It was low-fat and it was considered a dietary thing during that time and he wanted to dress it up a little bit with A-1 sauce. It was also very common for him to have carrot sticks, seedless grapes, celery sticks.”
Yet Mike McCurry, former press secretary to President Clinton, says, “Most people would assume that there’s a little bit more luxury than there is… . People would be surprised at the food. Not to offend the Air Force, but it’s basically military chow.”
Passengers are expected to eat what they are served. And the stewards are not pleased if a guest rejects a regular meal. That means more work for the galley. When a passenger asks for a substitute, such as a chicken-salad sandwich or similar light fare, the stewards try to handle the requests diplomatically but aren’t happy with the disruption of their routine.
FROM TIME TO TIME, someone in Congress or in the media raises questions about whether the cost of transporting the president has become excessive. They have a point.
Operating costs have soared over the years. In the 1950s, it cost $348 per hour to fly Eisenhower’s four-engine prop plane. In the mid- and late 1960s, under Lyndon Johnson, the 707 cost $1,995 per hour to fly. By 1976, under Gerald Ford, the cost had edged upward to $2,300 per flying hour. By the late 1970s, under Jimmy Carter, the operating cost for the 707 was about the same, $2,327 per hour.
Since 1991, the Air Force has estimated that it costs more than $40,000 per hour to fly the big 747. But fuel and supply costs fluctuate, and the estimate does not include many related expenses, such as the salaries of the crews or the special hangar that houses the aircraft at Andrews Air Force Base.
In 2000, President Clinton’s visit to Asia cost taxpayers an astronomical $63.5 million, which raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill. That included the cost of operating the two 747s, one as the primary presidential aircraft and one as the main backup, and flying other support planes, including a C-20C Gulfstream III in case of an emergency requiring a smaller aircraft, in addition to more than 60 other aircraft to haul personnel and equipment halfway around the world.
Yet the criticism has never caught on with the public. Americans seem to want their leader to travel in style as well as safety. And the amenities keep on proliferating. Under George W. Bush, satellite TV was added, along with a 50-inch-wide flat screen in the conference room. This gives the senior staff a much wider assortment of programming to watch from all around the world—especially baseball games, the president’s favorite TV fare—and breaking news on the networks. It also makes viewing more of a communal experience, because the large screen provides the feeling of a movie theater.
Passengers in each compartment have access to a list of first-run and classic movies in the Air Force One library, and they can pick whichever one they prefer on each cabin’s screen. Usually it is done by an informal consensus, although in the press cabin the photographers and TV crews often get to the phone first and simply order what they want. That generally means a shoot-em-up cop film or Western, a sci-fi flick, or a racy R-rated selection.
This can lead to bizarre moments. During Clinton’s 1996 campaign, the journalists grew fascinated with the movie Fargo, a brilliant but violent film about a pregnant cop and a variety of felons. On nearly every leg of every trip, Fargo would appear on the screen in the press compartment, and several passengers would recite the lines of each character from memory. This eventually caused a rift in the press corps as some reporters tired of the gambit.
THE 26-PERSON flight crew loves today’s plane like a member of the family. To them, the plane is known by its manufacturer’s designation, Boeing 747-200B. Actually, there are two identical jets with tail numbers 28000 and 29000; 28000 is the primary aircraft, and its twin, 29000, is the backup, flying almost wherever the primary jet goes, just in case. Whenever the president is aboard either plane—or any other Air Force aircraft, for that matter—the radio call sign is Air Force One.
“This is probably the most unique airplane in the world because it carries the most powerful leader in the world,” says Mark Rosenker, former director of the White House Military Office, which is responsible for the president’s overall transportation. “… You sit back and say, ‘My Lord, I’m sitting with the president of the United States. That’s unique.”
“Air Force One is adventure, camaraderie, teamwork,” says Franklin. “… You’re with these people for long periods of time. You’re putting them to bed, you’re waking them up. You’re seeing them at their absolute best. You’re seeing them when they’re absolutely tired… . I mean, long days, long hours, you’ve been over in the Middle East or the Far East, and you’re tired, and you’ve probably got the runs. And they come back on Air Force One, a little bit of home. It’s America. It’s a symbol and it’s a comfortable place to be. All the presidents have said they enjoyed Air Force One.”
THE PRESIDENT’S PLANE is much different from the standard 747 that a commercial traveler might fly. The VC-25A, which is the special model used by the commander in chief, has exotic electronic and communications equipment, relatively plush and spacious accommodations and furnishings, a self-contained baggage loader, front and aft stairs, and the capability for in-flight refueling. Its four General Electric CF6-80C2B1 jet engines can take the aircraft to 701 miles per hour. It stands 63 feet, 5 inches in height; is 231 feet, 10 inches in length; has a wingspan of 195 feet, 8 inches; and has a maximum takeoff weight of 833,000 pounds. It has 4,000 square feet of usable space, twice that of the average single-family American house.
The president’s suite would do a luxury hotel proud. It consists of a stateroom in the nose of the aircraft, decorated in beige, rust, and brown and featuring a wall mural that resembles a desert sunset. There are two couches, one along each side, that can be converted to beds and, next door, a bathroom with shower. Adjacent to the suite is a mini-clinic with a large cabinet full of medications and a surgical table that pulls out of a wall in case of a health emergency.
Next to this area is a spacious presidential office with a big beige wraparound desk, a first-class-style leather seat directly across from the desk, and two couches. The White House photographer’s office keeps the walls of the suite hung with up-to-date photos of the president’s journeys.
Behind the president’s suite is a senior-staff cabin, a galley, another staff compartment, a large conference room, another cabin for staff with a desk and chairs, a workroom with computers, a guest cabin, a Secret Service compartment, a press cabin, and the rear galley. The two galleys provide up to 100 meals at one sitting. There are six lavatories, which include facilities for the disabled.
Running along the left side of the fuselage is a long, softly lit corridor containing couches, tables, and lamps, like the reception area of a conference center in a big hotel. This “public area” is on the left side for security reasons. Air Force One always pulls up to an air terminal or public ceremony with its left side parallel to onlookers. This allows the president, senior staff, and other dignitaries to remain on the far side to lessen the chance of a successful attack.
AIR FORCE COLONEL MARK TILLMAN, the pilot, says the crew members, who are assigned to the 89th Airlift Wing under the Air Mobility Command at Andrews, “spend hours upon hours to make sure we never have a hiccup with it.” Still, not everything always goes perfectly.
The communications system, for example, is not what one might expect. Presidents and other passengers are regularly disconnected from secure calls—to foreign leaders, their national-security advisers, or others—and this problem has existed for years. Clinton used to rage about it because he would be embarrassed over frequently losing the connection in mid-sentence.
George W. Bush has endured the same problem, but he deals with it more philosophically. After September 11, the communications systems were upgraded, but White House advisers say it did not make a huge difference. “I can say to you that they’re good, they’re not great,” says a senior Bush adviser. “The not-secure calls are fine—but secure calls just take a while to establish sometimes. It’s just the nature of encryption—encryption moving at thirty-five thousand feet, at five hundred to six hundred miles an hour.” Mack McLarty, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, points out that a caller has to push a button on the side of the phone to talk when the security system is in use, and this causes a slight but unsettling delay. As a result, people talk over each other and conversations get confused.
And the plane is not immune to pilot foul-ups. Clinton’s plane was grounded for more than an hour in January 1998 at the LaCrosse, Wisconsin, airport when it got stuck in the mud. The White House used a smaller 707 instead of the 747 jumbo jet that day because the airstrip was judged too short for the larger plane, but still the pilot accidentally rolled one set of wheels off the runway on preparation for takeoff.
Efforts to extricate the jet using the pull of the engines failed while Clinton played a game of cards on board. Officials considered whether to remove some fuel to make the plane lighter, or to tow it out of the mud with trucks, but a simpler solution was found: A backup Air Force 707—in fact, the one (designated SAM 26000) that had flown John F. Kennedy’s body back to Washington from Dallas in 1963—was brought in, and this finally got the president out of town. The 707 pilot who got stuck in the mud never flew Clinton again, according to White House officials.
THERE ARE MANY FOLKWAYS aboard Air Force One. All the seats are assigned, regardless of which party is in power. But each White House has its own policy for deciding who goes where. Republican administrations like those of Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes tend to strictly assign seats based on seniority, with the most important aides getting the first-class chairs and the junior staffers stuck in the Air Force One equivalent of steerage.
GOP administrations tend to impose a protocol that no one is allowed to enter the seating areas in front of his or her assigned location. The president himself and the senior staff stay in the forward-most areas, which means the middle-level and junior aides are deeper and deeper into the plane. The most junior aides and a dozen Secret Service agents are in a rear compartment just ahead of the press pool, which fronts the rear galley.
Democratic administrations tend to give the aides the run of the plane. In Clinton’s time, everyone on the staff—including the president—mingled freely with everyone else, although no one could just walk in on the president in his bedroom or his office. If it happened by mistake, Clinton would glare at the offender. He would usually be clad in jeans and a T-shirt, and would be reading, watching TV, or listening to jazz turned up very loud to overcome his hearing problem. Some staffers couldn’t stand to be in his cabin at these times because it was so noisy.
At the start of each flight, each compartment receives a neatly printed menu of the food to be served and a weather report for the destination. Stewards come by shortly after takeoff to solicit drink orders, much like what happens in the first-class section of major airlines. Food service is prompt and efficient.
At one time, many trinkets and baubles were available on the plane, such as blue or white pads bearing the embossed words “Aboard Air Force One.” Also prized were Air Force One playing cards, mugs, glasses, and M&M’s candies in small boxes bearing a presidential signature. These items are very difficult to find today because the supply of freebies has been cut back drastically. What is still available is an almost unlimited supply of small, white paper napkins bearing the words Air Force One in blue. These, of course, have limited utility as gifts compared with the items available in the old days.
Another big change is the placement of the restroom for staff members and guests. Aboard the 707, the president and First Lady had their own lavatory, and nearly everyone else was expected to use a forward restroom and another one in the rear of the aircraft, just behind the press cabin. This meant that some VIPs had to walk down the aisle past reporters and photographers when nature called. Sometimes it was awkward because the officials, for obvious reasons, had no time for niceties. As they ran the gauntlet, the officials were questioned or badgered by the journalists, who tried to pressure nearly every walk-through into giving a mini-press conference.
The new 747 solved that problem. The aft restroom was given over totally to the press and extra facilities were added in the forward areas to accommodate the staff members and guests.
OVER THE YEARS, there have been many tales of amenity abuse on presidential trips. Some of the rumors are true.
For one thing, 40 years ago, White House staff members could arrange for girlfriends (the staff was virtually all male in those days) to hitch a ride on the plane and be given royal treatment. And while crew members and others say Lyndon Johnson had assignations with female passengers in his cabin, it would have been very difficult for staff members to have the same experience. There was too little privacy, and too little space, for that.
What has happened is more mundane, such as abuse of luggage privileges. During Gerald Ford’s era, presidential aides arranged for much-coveted Coors beer to be transported on the backup planes, since it was then a rare treat on the East Coast. And at the end of any trip to California, presidential aides and journalists showed up at check-in time with cases of wine to be lugged into the cargo holds of Air Force One and the press plane by baggage handlers. There is less of that today, since someone in the media would be sure to blow the whistle on such self-indulgence. Still, staff members, journalists, and guests continue to bring back prize purchases from exotic locales, ranging from rugs to wooden carvings. Once in a while, someone will get caught trying to avoid paying duty on a purchase, but this is rare.
TECHNICALLY, THE WHITE HOUSE and the military consider any aircraft carrying the president to be Air Force One, whether it’s an executive-style jet or a lumbering C130 cargo plane (and presidents have ridden on both, depending on the size of the airport he is traveling to and other factors). But what most people think of as Air Force One is a Boeing 747, the sleek and powerful four-engine transcontinental jet with the bubble top that is the president’s customary mode of travel.
The plane was ordered and designed starting in 1985, just after Ronald Reagan won his second term. Pentagon brass had recommended building a special 747 for the commander in chief for years, but no president had dared order it because they feared it would look profligate. In the end, two 747s were produced—one as a primary aircraft for the president and one as a backup—at a cost of more than $660 million. (And contrary to the myth popularized in the movies, the plane does not have an escape pod.)
The new plane was supposed to be on line in November 1988, but it took more than four years to build—a year longer than expected because of complications that arose in installing the sophisticated communications equipment that allows secure phone calls all over the world. Another problem was that the communications system was planned by Boeing for a smaller, less sophisticated model of the 747, and it didn’t work properly in the special version that the White House ordered. It took many months to redo it, according to flight personnel.
The VC-25A version of the 747, tail number 28000, first flew as Air Force One on September 6, 1990, when George Herbert Walker Bush took it from Washington to Kansas and Florida. Its twin, tail number 29000, was deployed March 26, 1991, according to the Air Force.
Everyone was thrilled, even though it came at a very high cost—an estimated $185 million a year to operate the plane and pay its crew, depending on how actively a president travels.
WILL THERE BE A NEW, twenty-first-century version of Air Force One? Flight experts predict that in the not-too-distant future, perhaps in 20 years, the president will routinely fly on a supersonic airplane. It will take that long because there are so few facilities around the world that can accommodate such a jet on a routine basis, and many years will go by before supersonic travel becomes economical. In addition, the supersonic jets now built by the aircraft companies are much smaller than the 747, so they would have limited utility for presidential entourages.
For the foreseeable future, the 747 will remain the president’s aircraft. “The president doesn’t need a bigger plane,” says retired Air Force general Brent Scowcroft, a former pilot and White House national security adviser who once served as head of the White House military office. “And you can upgrade the communications anytime you want. I don’t see any need for planning [for a new jet].”
Mark Rosenker, former director of the White House Military Office for George W. Bush, agrees. “There’s no plan in this administration to talk about a new transport,” he says.
Rosenker adds: “We’re always working to make improvements, not only in the operations but certainly any type of hardware improvement as advances come along. We’re dealing with an aircraft that is twelve years old, but the 747 [as a type of plane] has been around for twenty-five years. So when we can make technological improvements, we try to do that.”
The next improvement, he says, will be the addition of broadband communication, with the ability to get the Internet onto the airplane. This will let the staff shoot video and send it down to an earth station. It also will allow video-telephone calls and video conferencing. Plans are also being considered to upgrade the seats, converting each one into a larger, fully reclinable sleeper.
“It’s slowly going to be modified over the years,” says Air Force One pilot Mark Tillman, “but this plane is going to be around for quite a while.”