Former President Donald Trump has taken to claiming that his old private Boeing 757 jet, often referred to as "Trump Force One," is a more luxurious way to travel than the highly modified Boeing 747 used as Air Force One — a claim that really doesn't make any sense, wrote Jeff Wise for New York Magazine's "Intelligencer."
"He once told Rolling Stone that Air Force One is 'a step down' from his 757 'in every way.' But that’s pure delusion," wrote Wise. "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.'"
The truth is, behind the fancy coat of paint and retrofitting Trump gave the plane, it's an aging aircraft with mounting maintenance issues. And those issues are becoming more readily apparent as the years go by: in 2022, the plane was forced to make an emergency landing after one of the engines failed shortly after taking off from New Orleans.
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"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," wrote Wise. "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."
Trump's 757, Wise noted, was acquired to replace a 727 he had originally bought from his own failed Trump Shuttle airline, which he had purchased from the now-defunct Eastern Airlines. The 757, after being used by discount airlines in Denmark and Mexico, was sold to Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, who later sold it to Trump for $100 million, far more than it was worth, and spent millions more renovating the interior.
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Yet he's had problems with it from the start, not least the fact that it's too big to land at private airports generally frequented by the rich, and the fact that it can't pressurize the cabin as well as purpose-built private jets.
And at the end of the day, wrote Wise, if Trump can't retake the White House in November, he may not even have this jet for much longer: "He has hundreds of millions of dollars in legal judgments he must pay for fraud and defamation. Depending on how Trump’s various legal and political battles play out, it’s easy to imagine his finances imploding in a way he’s never yet experienced. And if his assets wind up getting repossessed, his aircraft will probably be among the first to go."