What’s the worst that could happen?
President Donald Trump is running out of patience with Boeing, which was supposed to deliver two new Air Force One planes by the end of his predecessor’s term. And guess who he’s turning to to speed things up? Elon Musk, who Trump has “empowered” to take measures to get the beleaguered aerospace company to stop dragging its feet, the New York Times reports.
Trump’s pick for the task isn’t surprising, since he’s asked the world’s richest man to do everything short of fixing the White House’s plumbing in his ostensible mission of making the federal government more “efficient.” If Musk can fly a rocket, Trump reportedly told associates, per the NYT, he can probably fly an airplane.
But the lengths that Trump is letting Musk go here are alarming. According to the NYT, Musk has questioned the amount of time needed to flight test the planes, and is also considering lowering the security clearance required to work on the new jets, which are armed with a bevy of sensitive systems to protect the president.
“The [safety] requirements could be scrubbed down and more risk can be assumed,” Biden-era Air Force secretary Frank Kendall told the NYT. “But you can also go too far. You do need to have the basic command and control capabilities and communications capabilities on the airplane.”
Trump originally commissioned the new Air Force Ones in 2018 as part of a $3.9 billion Air Force contract which he was heavily involved in negotiating, to have them be delivered by 2024.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Three years behind schedule, Boeing is now hinting that it likely won’t be able to finish building the presidential jets until the end of Trump’s second term. All the while, the aerospace company has been mired in bad press and investigations from the questionable construction of its aircraft, which have been involved in deadly crashes, to its disastrous Starliner spacecraft.
That’s where Musk comes in. He has promised he can get at least one of the planes wrapped up within a year — a huge turnaround.
Does that sound unrealistic to you? It certainly does to some of the officials working on the project, according to the NYT. But making far-fetched promises is Musk’s bread and butter, like his decades-long insistence that Tesla is about to achieve fully autonomous driving, which it hasn’t. While he’s been able to successfully string his companies’ investors along so far, this is an entirely different matter. Trump’s time in office is limited. For once, Musk is not beholden to his own timeline, but someone else’s.
To achieve that optimistic timeline, Musk and Boeing want to quickly bring more people onto the project. And to do that, they’re considering removing the requirement for a top-level security clearance known as “Yankee White.” We’ve already seen how risky the loosening of these protocols can be in Trump’s administration; at Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the vetting was so poor that it hired a 19-year-old high school grad, who was fired for leaking company secrets at his old job.
Musk’s other brilliant plan, according to former Air Force assistant secretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics Andrew Hunter, is to simply do the bare minimum.
“The idea was that we could just strip out a lot of the military stuff, just give the president a good-looking new airplane to fly in with commercial capabilities and maybe some minimal military upgrades,” Hunter told the NYT.
It makes for a hell of a risk. By expediting the production of an extremely advanced aircraft that he’ll be flying in all the time, Trump could be putting himself in harm’s way.
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