https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2025/05/14/qatar-747-trump/
The royals have failed to sell the plane, which was put on the market in 2020, according to an archived listing. Giving it away could save Qatar’s rulers a big chunk of change on maintenance and storage costs, aviation experts told Forbes. Making Trump happy would be an added bonus.
When the plane was bought in 2012, its list price was $367 million, not including the interior, which took three years to complete and likely cost tens of millions of dollars.
The 2020 sales brochure noted that the plane was due for a landing gear overhaul in 2024 and a 12-year check in 2027. A check in which the airplane and engines are taken apart, typically carried out every six to 12 years, can take months to complete and cost millions of dollars.
The plane would need to be stripped down and swept for bugs. Then, unless the administration is willing to accept the risks of lighter security, it would need to be built up to the Air Force’s requirements to serve as an airborne command center, with encrypted communications systems, shielding to protect the electronics from the effects of a nuclear blast and defenses against missiles.
It would take at least five years starting again from scratch, Aboulafia estimates, unless security requirements were relaxed.
Briefly, Qatar has been trying to offload this plane since 2020 but the market is extremely illiquid since its a massive gas guzzler and everyone is moving towards smaller, leaner air travel. Boeing has a couple planes intended to be for Air Force One in the pipeline but Trump is frustrated that they will be delayed to 2028. Cue Qatar seeing the opportunity curry favor with Trump by giving away their outdated junk (which they can’t find a buyer for) which costs millions in storage and maintenance fees.
A check in which the airplane and engines are taken apart, typically carried out every six to 12 years, can take months to complete and cost millions of dollars
This is for a normal plane. Every Air Force 1 (there are a couple) gets fully taken apart and rebuilt about every 6 months. And, the process of vetting and rebuilding this new dingus to become capable to be Air Force 1 will probably cost around a billion dollars. “Millions of dollars” is just the tip suggestion they’ll see on the screen when they go to pay for the absolutely monstrous amount of money this will cost the United States.
Source? That seems incredibly unrealistic to disassemble an entire plane and put it back together every six months. Its far more likely it gets thoroughly inspected every 6 months.
It’s not the whole plane, just major systems. The main cost is the engines, that alone likely costs millions. As it mentioned, there’s other overhauls too, like the landing gear that’s due. These are all on a fixed schedule related to “this many flight-hours” and a certain number of years or months for some parts. The engine overhaul isn’t just “six to twelve months,” it’s “this many flying hours” (which typically comes out to 6-12 months all the same).
I wouldn’t be upset about the overhauls, that’s a normal part of the cost of owning a plane (though it’s harder to sell if it’s due one, because the buyer will have to spend a fuckton of money before flying it).
The upsetting part is that’s is foreign and not up to spec - AKA yeah they’ll have to remove, scan, x-ray and debug every part of that interior and redo the entire electrical and coms system, and install nuclear shielding on the whole-ass plane. Still cheaper than buying a new AF1 but not by as much as one would hope.