The Qatari 747 is the Boeing jumbo jet presented to the United States by the government of Qatar and intended to serve as Air Force One. John Kiriakou reported on its condition in July 2026, in a run of shorter items at the end of a broadcast.[1]
The problem
The aircraft had, in his account, all kinds of problems. It was delivered to the president while he was overseas, and he ended up not using it to fly back — because it turned out that it had not been retrofitted with protective devices: missiles, radar jamming equipment, “whatever.”[1]
Kiriakou’s comment on the oversight is incredulous rather than technical. “I don’t know why we would have assumed that the Qataris would have loaded that stuff on the plane. Like what in the world were we thinking?”[2]
Where it left things
The result, as of his broadcast, was an aircraft not in use and not expected to be in use for quite some time.[2]
The item ran alongside two others in the same segment: Israel’s continuing anger at the International Criminal Court over the charges pending against Benjamin Netanyahu, and the observation that because neither Israel nor the United States is a signatory to the Rome Statute, the United States is under no obligation to arrest him — Netanyahu being due in Washington that same day.[2]
How the Qataris came to give it
Kiriakou, who says he has friends in five of the six Persian Gulf royal families and stays in close touch with most of them, gives an account of the gift from a member of one of them. The 747 was not volunteered: it came in reaction to President Donald Trump asking the Qataris whether they would give him a free Boeing 747. They were offended by the request — but Arab culture, in this telling, is such that a request for hospitality cannot be denied, and most people ask for a glass of water or a cup of tea rather than an airliner.[3][4]
The offence surfaced in the wording of the handover. When the aircraft was finally turned over to the United States government, the Qataris announced that it was a gift from the people of Qatar to the people of the United States, and not a gift to Donald Trump. Trump answered that a few weeks before this episode by announcing that when he completes his term he will take the 747 and park it at what will be his presidential library, making him the only president ever to have flown in it.[5][6]
The aircraft’s unfinished defensive and communications fit is also the background to the catering truck transfer: had the Qatari plane been fully secured, the deception at the NATO summit might not have been necessary.[7][8]