Leaving the NATO summit in Turkey on July 8, 2026, with U.S. and Iranian forces trading strikes, Trump flew home on the older Air Force One and sent the new Qatari-gifted jet ahead to England. The Secret Service had urged him to do it, out of what officials described as an abundance of caution.
The reason is the aircraft itself. U.S. officials told CBS News the former Qatari royal jet was hurried into service and lacks some of the capabilities the presidential fleet is supposed to have. The Associated Press analyzed images of the plane and found it missing at least some of the defensive systems and communications antennae visible on the Cold War-era jets it is meant to replace, including infrared defensive systems that sit behind the engines on the existing aircraft.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer, put it bluntly: the plane is “not equipped with appropriate comms/force pro/security package for intl duty,” and “Secret Service and USAF pleas must have won out, over Trump's vanity project.” The White House maintains the jet has high-level security; outside experts have questioned that.
The gift was already the subject of ethics objections when Qatar handed over the roughly $400 million aircraft. What the Iran escalation exposed is a second problem: the plane a foreign government gave the president of the United States is not, by the assessment of his own protective detail, safe to fly him out of a war zone (see Trump Accepted a Luxury 747 From Qatar's Government to Fly as Air Force One and Says It Will Go to His Library and Trump Tells a Reporter She Will Die With Him if Iran Hits Air Force One: 'If I Go, You Go').