Air Force One used to be a high-flying symbol of American technology, ingenuity and power. For many, it was also a source of national pride.
The current Boeing 747s that serve as Air Force One are a combination transport vehicle, command center, press room, medical center and apartment, complete with bedroom and office for the nation’s chief executive.
Now, to many, Air Force One has become scandalous.
On July 8, 2026, The New York Times reported that the latest version of the presidential aircraft – presented by Qatar as a gift to President Donald Trump – lacks the sophisticated countermeasures that were a ready defense for the 747s that had been in service since 1990. Critics immediately revived earlier claims that the new 747 was a corrupt transaction from the start. Trump later said the plane would be sent to be “maxed out” with upgrades.
This article is not part of that story. Nor is it the standard story of Air Force One that appears in numerous documentaries, which tend to be gee-whiz accounts of the amazing capacities of the president’s airplane.
I am a historian writing a book about the technologies that have shaped the long history of the American presidency, in which Air Force One looms large. I believe it is important to see Air Force One as more than a cool gadget or political flash point. Von Hardesty, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, certainly understood this when he wrote that “by the end of the 20th century, Air Force One had evolved into an essential arm of the American Presidency.”
Put simply, the presidency as we know it today would have been impossible without Air Force One, which has shaped and defined that role for decades.
Horse-drawn carriage to the ‘Sacred Cow’
It was only recently that Americans or their presidents could imagine things this way. When presidents left the capital throughout most of the nation’s history, it was a lengthy, at times arduous, process that severed their connection with government offices.
As a result, presidents rarely traveled while in office and were more likely to depart Washington for extended vacations than for official business. Likewise, no serving president left the United States until Teddy Roosevelt visited the construction of the Panama Canal in 1906. Woodrow Wilson became the first sitting president to cross the Atlantic when he boarded the USS George Washington in 1918 to join the negotiations in Versailles at the end of World War I.
If few presidents got away from Washington to see the country and its residents before 1900, the flip side was also true: Few Americans saw presidential candidates or incumbents in person, especially Americans who lived outside the eastern third of the United States. Instead, the connection between presidents and average citizens was mediated through political parties, the press and eventually through broadcast media.
The first designated presidential aircraft arrived in 1933, but Franklin Roosevelt never flew on it. His first flight as president came in 1943, when American Airlines loaned a flying boat called the Dixie Clipper to ferry Roosevelt to meet with other Allied leaders at the Casablanca Conference. In 1945, Roosevelt traveled to Yalta on a Douglas VC-54C called the Sacred Cow, the first plane specifically built for presidential travel.
Despite these flights to important international meetings, Roosevelt and successors Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower made limited domestic use of aircraft, preferring instead to travel by railroad. International trips remained lengthy journeys in loud, propeller-driven aircraft that encountered the greater turbulence of lower altitudes.
All this changed in 1962, when President John Kennedy acquired a brand-new Boeing 707, the first jet-powered Air Force One.
Presidential ubiquity
Flying higher, faster and quieter than their predecessors, the jet aircraft used for Air Force One made possible one of the central facets of the modern presidency: The nation’s chief executive could be a ubiquitous player in national politics and world affairs.
Presidential travel increased dramatically, both in its frequency and in the number of stops on each trip. This was not simply the result of the growing use of air travel worldwide. Where Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower understood world leadership as their ability to coordinate American power from Washington, Kennedy and his successors sought to make themselves the center of the story.
This seemed particularly important during the Cold War. As the United States asserted its leadership in the struggle against the Soviet Union, American presidents positioned themselves as the symbols of freedom in opposition to communism.
Consider President Richard Nixon traveling to China in 1972 to normalize relations, or Ronald Reagan flying to Iceland for the 1986 Reykjavík conference with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to negotiate the future of intermediate-range nuclear missiles. The presence of a president at these conferences elevated both the importance of the event and the image of the president as a statesman who was able to quickly pivot back and forth from national to international leadership.
As American presidents struggled to maintain their power and their relevance after the end of the Cold War, their international travel only increased. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama each made over twice the number of international trips as Ronald Reagan did.
These trips ranged from goodwill visits to maintain old alliances to attempts to build new connections after the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Presidents specifically visited international hot spots, positioning themselves as global peacemakers. The sight of the American president descending the long stairs from Air Force One, smiling and waving along the way, became a symbol of American diplomacy.
Official business – and campaigning
If Air Force One enabled presidents to announce themselves as statesmen abroad, it also revolutionized politics at home.
During the 1970s, the two major parties moved from selecting their nominees at national conventions to a system where state primaries decided who would lead the ticket.
This change emerged from demands that political power move from party leaders to party members. But a primary system would have been unimaginable without aircraft to shuttle candidates around the country. That was particularly important for incumbents, as air travel enabled them to be both sitting presidents and active candidates.
Presidents and their handlers learned how to combine official government business, which permitted the use of Air Force One, with campaign opportunities. These moments not only changed how presidents operated; they changed how Americans understood their presidents.
This change began with Kennedy’s use of the jet-powered Air Force One for domestic travel, including the tragic decision to visit Texas in November 1963, where he was assassinated. In just his first year in office, Bill Clinton visited 37 states over the course of 73 days.
Air Force One is a symbol of presidential power, but its problems only reinforce the fact that technology shapes the presidency.
The clearest demonstration was on 9/11. President Bush was in Florida that morning. Air Force One whisked him into the air, delivering him first to the safety of an Air Force base in Louisiana and then to the fortified headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command in Nebraska, and still had him back at the White House by the end of the day.
It was a grim reminder of the other task for Air Force One: a safe transport for the president during a national crisis or nuclear armageddon. While the aircraft fulfilled its promise to keep the president safe in a crisis, its legendary communication systems faltered. Crucially, Bush struggled to coordinate with senior officials in Washington, leaving him momentarily out of the loop at a terrifying historical juncture.
The role that presidents have assumed at home and abroad, as well as the ways Americans interact with their presidents, have taken form throught the possibilities – and the limitations – of presidential aircraft. Air Force One is not just a great way to travel or a nifty gadget, nor is it peripheral to the presidency. It is central to it.
Peter Kastor, Professor of History & American Culture Studies, Washington University in St. Louis
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
