Trump wants to 'max out' Air Force One

President Donald Trump said his new Air Force One needs to be upgraded.

“It has a lot of capability,” Trump said Sunday, but “in about a month ​or so, they’re gonna send it to have it be maxed out.” He said it would take “about a month,” but did not share any details on what upgrades would take place.

Rollout of the $400 million jet, a Boeing 747-8 gifted last year by the government of Qatar, hasn’t gone completely smoothly for Trump following a rushed retrofit job and mounting questions over its security. To update the plane, teams installed new engines, airstairs, an additional exterior door, and a new communications system, as well as completed a new paint job, over a truncated timeline. What it is still reportedly missing are advanced security measures.

Trump took the aircraft for its maiden voyage to the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota earlier this month, but after flying on it to Turkey for a NATO summit, he took a different plane for the return trip.

While Trump claimed he switched jets for the flight home “for old time’s sake” and denied it was for security reasons, the New York Times reported it was actually done at the urging of the Secret Service because the jet lacked defensive countermeasures, like advanced antimissile capabilities, and over concerns due to heightened tensions in the Iran war. The Trump administration subpoenaed Times journalists who reported on the security concerns earlier this month, which the Times is fighting in court.

Senate Democrats have criticized Trump’s obtainment of the aircraft as corrupt and say work on the plane has not been transparent.

“Americans deserve answers on how the administration has decided to spend their taxpayer dollars, and ignore real national security concerns… all in service of delivering President Trump a pretty, fancy plane for his personal enjoyment,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and others wrote in a letter dated July 7 to the secretary of the Air Force and CEO of the defense contractor L3Harris, which worked on the jet.

Normally, the process of modifying a jet for use as Air Force One would take years, but a team of about 400 employees instead had 10 months to meet a July 4 deadline, Jason Lambert, president of L3Harris’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance division, told the defense industry trade publication Breaking Defense.

Senate Democrats asked representatives from Air Force and L3Harris to join a classified briefing on August 6 to answer questions about the total cost of the project, the timeline of how the jet would have been retrofitted had it not been given a July 4 deadline, and any capabilities that were not added to the jet because of the deadline.