US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he was delighted to make his first flight aboard his new Air Force One plane and thanked Qatar for the controversial gift of the luxury plane.
Trump said the United States “couldn’t build a plane like this,” even though the heavily modified Boeing 747-8 plane was originally manufactured there.
“To be honest, I’m excited about the first flight. No one has ever seen anything like it,” Trump told reporters accompanying him, including an AFP photographer, before his trip to North Dakota.
The 80-year-old president will attend an event at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library as part of celebrations for the 250th anniversary of American independence.
“They just completed it. They made it fit for a president, that means security and all the different bells and whistles they put in. Very complex things, but it really is something extraordinary,” Trump said at Joint Base Andrews, near Washington.
Critics have raised a number of ethical, constitutional and security concerns about the gift of a plane worth hundreds of millions of dollars from a foreign power like Qatar.
The wealthy Gulf emirate, which also plays a key role as a mediator in talks between the United States and Iran, donated the plane last year. Since then it has been subject to significant modifications and testing.
The first flight also comes just a day after Trump faced increased ethical scrutiny over filings showing he earned about $1.2 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency companies in his first year back in power.
But Trump dismissed any suggestion of wrongdoing, saying the cost to American taxpayers of retrofitting the Qatari plane was “very small relative to what it would cost if we did it another way.”
“Frankly, we couldn’t build a plane like this because we wouldn’t be willing to spend the amount of money necessary. They spent a lot of money,” Trump told reporters.
Trump said he had asked the emir of Qatar if he could use the plane, but “he said, ‘no, no, I would like to make a contribution to the country, so it was very nice.'”
The plane will serve as a stopgap until Boeing delivers two new specially designed Air Force Ones, which are expected to be delivered in two years after a series of delays and cost overruns.
Trump has long been obsessed with replacing the current aging fleet of Air Force One, although one of them appeared to be flying as backup for him on Wednesday.
