A bottomless pit: Boeing's entanglement with the new Air Force One - and the Israeli connection
Boeing has updated its forecasts, revealing that its loss on the US President's next aircraft project will exceed the $3 billion mark. What went wrong, and why, like Knaf Zion, have heads-of-state aircraft become a political and economic problem?
The costs of the next Air Force One project for the US President have jumped by another $280 million, increasing Boeing's loss on the project to $3.08 billion, the American company reported in its second-quarter report.
The pair of VC-25A aircraft, used in the presidential version of the Boeing 747, have been serving President Donald Trump for over 30 years. Boeing signed a $3.9 billion contract to supply the US Air Force with two new aircraft based on the 747-800, the final version of the veteran Jumbo, whose production ceased in 2023. To save time and money, the company purchased two used aircraft and began converting them.
But the project turned out to be an image and economic disaster for the company. The honor of flying the US President led the company to sign a fixed-price contract, so any changes would be at its own expense. The project includes two identical aircraft, the first of which was supposed to be delivered back in 2024. But ongoing changes in configuration and electrical wiring, rust discovered in the aircraft structure — a serial defect in the 747-800 — along with technological updates due to the project's extension and the obsolescence of some aircraft systems, led to a large budget and schedule overrun.
The company was required to urgently recruit senior engineers and mechanics, and pay exceptionally high wages to employees with the highest level of security clearance — a mandatory requirement for working on the most secure aircraft in the world.
In the last quarter, Boeing increased its investment in the project by adding resources and personnel to try to meet the new deadline: delivery of the first aircraft in 2028 and the second a year later. Among the latest changes: installation of a new classified communication system that will allow the President to conduct secure calls from his plane with senior government officials and US military forces. The entire project is expected to cost about $6.9 billion in the end, and Boeing, which did not ensure it would be compensated for changes and updates in the project and discovered it had misjudged the scale of the work, will bear the difference between what it receives from the US government and the full expenses itself.
Due to the aging of the pair of existing aircraft, Donald Trump promoted receiving a 747-800 as a gift from Qatar, after it had been used by its royal family, as a temporary solution. After months of conversion, Donald Trump managed to take a few flights on it, but after landing in Turkey, he took off on one of the old Air Force One planes, which was summoned to the scene because the temporary plane was not equipped with the defense systems that the pair of old planes have, and the US received a warning that the Iranians would try to assassinate Donald Trump when he took off from Turkey.
In this, Air Force One resembles the Prime Minister's plane project, "Knaf Zion," in Israel. In our country, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) beat Elbit in the tender for the purchase and conversion of a used Boeing 767 as the Israeli version of the Air Force One plane. Here too, the project exceeded its schedule and budget.
This week, Yedioth Ahronoth reported that according to the Prime Minister's Office data, the costs of purchasing and converting the plane amounted to 325 million shekels. Moreover: in 2023-2025 alone, Israeli citizens paid 60 million shekels just for the operation of the plane. In 2024, costs stood at 34.18 million shekels, and in 2025 they dropped to 18.67 million shekels. The reason, apparently: the dramatic reduction in the foreign trips of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following the international arrest warrants issued against him, which left the plane on the ground most of the time, but required continued payment to the flight and ground crew of the plane, and for its training.
The Prime Minister's Office flatly refused to disclose how much each individual flight costs (fuel, security, food, and crew) or what the insurance costs of the plane are, claiming that disclosing the information "could harm the security of the state."
Although the purchase of Knaf Zion was justified, among other things, by the need to fly an entourage and journalists with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister's Office refused to include journalists on the current flight to the US, who flew to the US on commercial flights.
