The Pentagon reportedly forgot to account for one item in Donald Trump’s much-touted $4 billion upgrade to a new version of Air Force One — the $84 million instruction manual.
As Defense One reported, the U.S. Air Force posted an announcement this week that it was amending the total cost of the purchase with Boeing on a new version of the aircraft used as the primary means of air transportation for U.S. presidents.
The announcement noted that the contract with Boeing had been modified to upgrade commercial manuals that will include more than 100,000 pages with specifications for both flying the plane and fixing it. The manual will take until January of 2025 to complete, the Air Force noted in its announcement.
As the Defense One report noted, Trump has made it a priority to buy a new version of Air Force One since he first took office, though he initially pushed back against the $4.4 billion price tag and personally negotiated a deal with former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg to cut the cost by $500 million.
The deal itself will stretch beyond that price tag, the report noted. The $3.9 billion price tag does not include the cost of the 747s themselves and extensive modification work needed, and Boeing “demanded [the Air Force’s] silence” on that aspect as a stipulation of the deal, the report noted.
The Air Force will also spend $1.4 billion on an assortment of parts and services, including testing, training, and the construction of new hangars at Joint Base Andrews outside of Washington, D.C., the report added.
In all, the project is expected to cost more than $5.3 billion, Defense One reported.
As Vox reported back in December of 2016, after Trump had won the presidential election and close to a month before he took office, the controversy surrounding the price tag for Air Force One has stretched on long before his time in politics. And though Trump prioritized the need for a new version of Air Force One since taking office, there have been plans in place for more than a decade to replace the current fleet.
The technical components of the upgrade have been in contention as well.
“So in 2009, the Pentagon started actively working on plans for a new Air Force One,” the report noted. “From the start, the project has been dogged by a constantly growing list of technical requirements for the new planes. After six years of budget battles and other wrangling, the Air Force insisted that it had hired Boeing, but not necessarily agreed to buy 747-8s.”
