JOINT BASE ANDREWS, United States: US President Donald Trump said Sunday his new Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet needed to be sent off for a month to be \u201cmaxed out,\u201d after reports of security concerns on a trip to Turkiye.<\/p>\n
Trump took his first flight on the retrofitted Boeing 747-8 plane on July 1, but questions swirled after he took an older jet home from a NATO meeting in Ankara on July 10.<\/p>\n
The New York Times reported that the new plane lacked the same security countermeasures, including anti-missile defenses. Its reporters were then subpoenaed by the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has a lot of capability, but as I understand it, in about a month or so, they\u2019re going to send it to have it be maxed out,\u201d Trump told reporters when asked why he was still flying on a plane without full defensive capabilities.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo they\u2019re going to be sending it, and they\u2019ll have it be maxed out. It\u2019ll take about a month.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump, who was speaking after flying back to Washington from the World Cup final in New Jersey, did not give details about how the plane would be \u201cmaxed out.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 80-year-old Republican has previously played down any suggestion of problems with the new aircraft.<\/p>\n
He originally said he had sent the plane on ahead from the Turkiye summit to an air base in Britain so that service members could see it.<\/p>\n
Qatar\u2019s royal family donated the luxury airliner last year after Trump complained about the state of the two aging jets that have served as the US presidential plane since 1990.<\/p>\n
Critics have raised a host of ethical, constitutional and security concerns about the gifting of an aircraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars by a foreign power like Qatar.<\/p>\n
The aircraft features a new Trump-designed livery in red, white and navy blue, in a change from the previous white and light blue livery.<\/p>\n
Two brand new Boeing Air Force Ones are due to be delivered later this decade after a series of delays and cost overruns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
JOINT BASE ANDREWS, United States: US President Donald Trump said Sunday his new Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet needed to be sent off for a month to be \u201cmaxed out,\u201d after reports of security concerns on a trip to Turkiye. Trump took his first flight on the retrofitted Boeing 747-8 plane on July 1, but …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":100501,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100503,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100486\/revisions\/100503"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}