Boeing’s money pit of an Air Force One project just sank a little deeper.
The company said it’s making a substantial effort to get the first of two presidential planes out the door – four years later and for billions of dollars more than initially promised.
CEO Kelly Ortberg on Tuesday told employees via an internal email that the company is adding “significant resources” to deliver the heavily modified 747-8 jets by 2028. That ramp-up in production and certification resources in the Air Force One program cost Boeing an additional $280 million last quarter, the company announced in its quarterly financial statement.
The program’s cost overruns have now surpassed $3.1 billion. Boeing has agreed to foot that bill.
President Donald Trump has taken a particular interest in the new Air Force One planes. He persuaded former Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun in 2018 to sign a government contract that capped the cost to the American taxpayer at $3.9 billion. That contract has since been modified, growing the price tag to around $4.5 billion to include spare parts and other items.
Over the past six years, the planes have proven significantly more expensive than Boeing had anticipated. The company has cited various reasons for the massive cost overruns, including engineering design changes related to wiring and other structural requirements, schedule delays, performance issues at a key supplier 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 last year accepted a Qatari-donated 747 jet to serve as Air Force One after the US military added security features to the plane. Although he started flying the jet, Trump has acknowledged that the Qatari airplane lacks the security features of the existing and future aircraft contracted by the government to serve as Air Force One planes.
Trump flew the Qatari-gifted plane to a NATO summit in Turkey earlier this month, but then unexpectedly flew home on an the older Air Force One jet because of security concerns.
The existing presidential planes have been in service since 1990, first used by the George H. W. Bush administration. They have become so costly to fly and repair that the government deemed in 2015 they were in need of replacement.
But Trump became personally involved in the contract for the new jets before his first term. In a December 2016 social media post, Trump threatened to cancel the order for the planes because of the high cost of designing them.
Former CEO Calhoun in 2022 called the planes and the negotiation with Trump “unique,” but he said the deal was risky and Boeing shouldn’t have signed it.
The massive losses tied to the Air Force One program coincided with separate and significant financial trouble for the airplane manufacturer.
Boeing at the time that it renegotiated the Air Force One contract had just been getting its 737 Max program back online after two fatal crashes grounded the entire fleet of those jets for 20 months. And in January 2024, a door plug blowout on a Boeing 737 Max led more production delays, regulatory scrutiny and finanical losses.
Boeing posted on Tuesday a $428 million loss in the second quarter, on top of a $7 million loss in the first quarter. While the quarterly loss was slightly narrower than the same quarter in 2025, the company’s balance sheet remains filled with red ink.
