Boeing’s cash pit of an Air Force One venture just sank a little deeper.
The firm mentioned it’s making a substantial effort to get the primary of two presidential planes out the door – 4 years later and for billions of {dollars} greater than initially promised.
CEO Kelly Ortberg on Tuesday instructed staff by way of an inside electronic mail that the corporate is including “significant resources” to ship the closely modified 747-8 jets by 2028. That ramp-up in manufacturing and certification sources within the Air Force One program price Boeing an extra $280 million final quarter, the corporate introduced in its quarterly monetary assertion.
The program’s price overruns have now surpassed $3.1 billion. Boeing has agreed to foot that invoice.
President Donald Trump has taken a explicit curiosity within the new Air Force One planes. He persuaded former Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun in 2018 to signal a authorities contract that capped the fee to the American taxpayer at $3.9 billion. That contract has since been modified, rising the price tag to round $4.5 billion to incorporate spare elements and different objects.
Over the previous six years, the planes have confirmed considerably dearer than Boeing had anticipated. The firm has cited varied causes for the large price overruns, together with engineering design adjustments associated to wiring and different structural necessities, schedule delays, efficiency points at a key provider and engineering inefficiencies from the pandemic.
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2026: $280 million
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2025: $60 million
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2024: $379 million
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2023: $482 million
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2022: $1.45 billion
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2021: $318 million
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2020: $168 million
Fed up with the delays, Trump final 12 months accepted a Qatari-donated 747 jet to function Air Force One after the US navy added safety features to the airplane. Although he began flying the jet, Trump has acknowledged that the Qatari airplane lacks the safety features of the prevailing and future plane contracted by the federal government to function Air Force One planes.
Trump flew the Qatari-gifted airplane to a NATO summit in Turkey earlier this month, however then unexpectedly flew house on an the older Air Force One jet because of security concerns.
The current presidential planes have been in service since 1990, first utilized by the George H. W. Bush administration. They have turn out to be so expensive to fly and restore that the federal government deemed in 2015 they had been in want of substitute.
But Trump turned personally concerned within the contract for the new jets earlier than his first time period. In a December 2016 social media post, Trump threatened to cancel the order for the planes due to the excessive price of designing them.
Former CEO Calhoun in 2022 known as the planes and the negotiation with Trump “unique,” however he mentioned the deal was dangerous and Boeing shouldn’t have signed it.
The large losses tied to the Air Force One program coincided with separate and important monetary hassle for the airplane producer.
Boeing on the time that it renegotiated the Air Force One contract had just been getting its 737 Max program again on-line after two deadly crashes grounded your complete fleet of these jets for 20 months. And in January 2024, a door plug blowout on a Boeing 737 Max led extra manufacturing delays, regulatory scrutiny and finanical losses.
Boeing posted on Tuesday a $428 million loss within the second quarter, on prime of a $7 million loss within the first quarter. While the quarterly loss was barely narrower than the identical quarter in 2025, the corporate’s steadiness sheet stays full of purple ink.