LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The new Air Force One is out of commission. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported the Secret Service urged President Trump to leave a NATO summit in Turkey on an older version of Air Force One instead of the Boeing 747 donated by Qatar last year. The reporting said that was because of security concerns. Then Trump talked about the Qatari plane after coming home from the World Cup final on Sunday.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It has a lot of capability. But as I understand it, in about a month or so, they're going to send it to have it be maxed out. So they're going to be sending it, and they'll have it be maxed out. It'll take about a month.
FADEL: Here to help us understand what might be happening to the plane is Dan Lamothe. He covers the U.S. military for The Washington Post. Good morning, and thanks for joining us.
DAN LAMOTHE: Yes, hello.
FADEL: So we heard the president talk about maxed out, maxing out the plane. What does that mean?
LAMOTHE: Yeah, so the old Air Force One has some of the same capabilities that you'd expect in jets you'd find in combat, missile warning sensors, kind of exquisite radars, flare dispensers, things that can help it if it were to be attacked. The new one - and it's been known really since the start, and this has been raised as a concern since really the Trump administration first announced that it would bring this plane on - wasn't built for that. So they sent it in. They gave it 400 million in upgrades. But it's always been very vague what upgrades it got, what upgrades it didn't get.
And clearly, now that they're kind of seeing some of the concerns come up, they've decided to add additional capabilities. What they're adding now versus what they added some months ago, that has remained unclear. There you start running into military capabilities and classification issues. And it's been vague. But clearly this plane did not have everything that the old Air Force One had.
FADEL: So the president admits this plane needs some upgrades, but then he bashes The New York Times for reporting about the concerns. I mean, why?
LAMOTHE: Yeah. I mean, I think you'd have to ask the president to that - to some degree. But really, I think what you're running into here is his concerns with the plane not standing up to scrutiny, really. This is a plane that everybody had questions about at the beginning. Wiring issues, communication issues and defensive capabilities was always something that people who study these issues said that this would be a concern. It has become a concern.
FADEL: How much risk would you say the president and his passengers faced on board the flight to Ankara for that NATO summit, given the Secret Service urged the president not to leave on that plane?
LAMOTHE: Yeah, I mean, I think there is some amount of risk here. I think given what we didn't know the plane had or didn't have, it's a little challenging to assess. Other world leaders all flew into the same summit. So I think that, you know, I think that's worth noting as well. But yeah, I mean, as this developed, and I think really what really may have changed the situation here - on July 7, as the president was in Turkey, they made the judgment call to start bombing Iran in a serious way again. That seems to maybe have had a factor on the risks here. You know, you kind of shifted the situation on the ground while you were much closer to Iran than you otherwise would've been.
FADEL: Dan Lamothe covers the military for The Washington Post. Thank you so much for your time.
LAMOTHE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
