How the New, Qatar-Gifted Air Force One Is Different From the Old Ones

On the Fourth of July this year, President Trump is planning some kind of flight formation over Washington, D.C. led by Air Force One, which I guess might pass for excitement if you live in Washington, D.C. But this being the big 250th birthday bash for America, this will be the new Air Force One, which was just unveiled on Friday. In some of his oft-quoted remarks about this plane, Trump has said, “This is considered ​the world’s most luxurious plane.” And he’s claimed that part of the rationale for speeding this long-stalled project along was that other countries’ heads of state “have a plane that’s much newer ​and much better.” So how exactly is this plane “better”? Alternatively, is this plane, in fact, worser? This is going to be an article about a plane, its features, and its attributes. But this plane—the one supposedly gifted to the U.S. military from the nation of Qatar—happens to be a touchy topic, so at the start let me try to dispense with the biggest difference between this one and the old one, the controversy: Experts have laid out the case many times that the means by which this plane changed hands from Qatar to the U.S. was unconstitutional because it allegedly viol