President Trump is angry over delays to Air Force One. It could spell even more

New York
CNN
 — 

Boeing has had six years of production problems, safety issues, delivery delays and unhappy buyers of its aircraft. But President Donald Trump’s anger at the delays for the next generation of Air Force One jets could result in a huge blow to what remains of the company’s prestige and finances going forward.

The rift between Trump and Boeing could a be a serious problem for Boeing under a presidential administration that is looking to make massive government spending cuts, lawsuits and Congress notwithstanding.

The company gets 42% of its revenue from US government contracts, according to its most recent filing. In 2022 Boeing moved its corporate headquarters from Chicago to the Washington, DC, suburb of Arlington, Virginia, close to the Pentagon, an indication of how it views the importance of its defense business. But that business is far more at risk than even its troubled commercial plane business.

Trump has groused for days about the wait for the next generation of Boeing 747 jets that are supposed to serve as the primary presidential air transport, officially known as the VC-25B but flying under the name Air Force One when the president is onboard. The jets currently flying under the Air Force One moniker have been in service since the George H.W. Bush administration. The new planes were supposed to be delivered in 2024 when the contracts were originally awarded in 2018, but are still years away from completion according to the latest estimates.

The president said earlier this week he’s interested in possibly looking to buy used jets elsewhere and refurbishing them. It would be a similar move to one he made early in his first term, after he ordered the US Air Force to re-negotiate the Air Force One contract with Boeing. Boeing has been working on refurbishing two 747 jets that had been originally built for commercial use ever since.

“I’m not happy with the fact that it’s taken so long,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One Wednesday evening. “There’s no excuse for it.”

He said Wednesday on Air Force One that he wouldn’t consider using a jet made by Boeing’s European competitor Airbus but that, “I could buy one that was used and convert it…. So we’re looking at other alternatives.”

Trump’s anger at Boeing over the Air Force One delays might be translating into further worries for the company’s larger defense business, according to Richard Aboulafia, a managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory, an aerospace consulting firm.

While Boeing has been a major supplier of military drones in the past, the Pentagon’s most recent drone contracts went to competitors. “Boeing was conspicuously absent,” Aboulafia said.

And Boeing, with its reliance on military procurement for its balance sheet, is vulnerable to spending cuts. Despite Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth calling for increased defense spending just a week ago, the Trump administration issued a memo Wednesday ordering the military to cut 8% from its budget each year for the next five years.

Boeing could thus be an easy target for an administration that is already upset over a major project of great personal interest to Trump, as well as one that has put Elon Musk – no fan of crewed jets like the F-15 built by Boeing for the US Air Force – in charge of those spending cuts.

“It would be extremely easy to cancel the F-15 program and buy more of something else or divert the cash to other needs,” said Richard Aboulafia, managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory, an aerospace consulting firm. He said the military has already indicated a desire to use more drones and fewer piloted aircraft.

Boeing’s space business has been a huge disappointment as well, where it is a major competitor to SpaceX, owned and run by Musk.

SpaceX has been delivering astronauts and supplies to space for NASA for years. By comparison Boeing’s Starliner rocket was years behind plans for its first crewed mission to take astronauts to the International Space Station. When that flight took place last year, problems with the spacecraft forced NASA to have it return to earth without anyone on board, leaving the two astronauts stranded at the ISS. They will soon return home on in a SpaceX Dragon capsule.

Despite Trump’s talk about finding an alternative to provide the next Air Force One jets, the problem is not the basic…