Eric Lipton
speaker
759 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 5 Aug
Eric Lipton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You know, it's a lounge kind of a setup.
It's not really like a passenger plane.
So they had to get certification from the FAA to be kind of a special condition outside of the normal FAA.
And that didn't come until the day the plane started flying on July 1st of 2026.
It's true.
I mean, it carries cabinet members.
It carries other world leaders, members of Congress.
There are dozens of people on that flight when he goes more than 100 at times.
I mean, the truth of the matter is that this is a much newer plane than the old Air Force One that has been around since George H.W.
Bush.
And to some extent, it's a safer platform in the extent that it's a newer plane.
But it does not have all the security trappings that are associated with Air Force One.
And that's part of the reason that he acknowledged that he's going to max it up later this year and they're going to take it out of service and to try to add some additional measures to it to try to get it closer to the standard that we expect nowadays to have, you know, kind of a flying Oval Office.
I mean, it's sort of crazy, but they won't tell us.
But it's clearly it's close to a billion dollars, it appears.
They had said publicly that it was something around $400 million even after the plane was donated, but we know that it was hundreds of millions of dollars in addition to that because they rushed so much to try to get this plane ready that they actually had to buy another Lufthansa 747-8 to train the pilots to fly this new plane because it has a different cockpit than the old Air Force One.
First, they leased an Atlas cargo plane at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and then they bought another Lufthansa plane, which is sitting now in a hangar in
at the Andrews Air Force facility in Maryland, simply to train the pilots on it because they had to transition so quickly to this because Trump wanted his new plane.
That's right.
I mean, the Air Force One is actually designed to be able to keep flying in the event of a nuclear war.
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