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Mr. Trump’s February 2025 tour of the Qatari jet led to a frantic sprint inside the White House and the Pentagon. The administration sought to upgrade the plane in time to meet his demand for it to be ready by the nation’s 250th birthday this summer, with an accelerated retrofit.

An investigation by The New York Times found that the president’s push to get the luxury aircraft quickly led to ballooning costs and trade-offs in safety features that potentially left Mr. Trump and others who travel with him on Air Force One vulnerable.

Among the findings:

• Mr. Trump was personally engaged in making decisions about the retrofitting of the donated plane, giving the final approval on the features and security measures that would be included, according to people familiar with his role. They and others interviewed for this article described the sensitive information about the process and the plane on the condition of anonymity.

• Several key security and safety features on the Boeing planes that have been used for decades as Air Force One are not visible on the upgraded jet, including a lower-level exit for high-risk situations, additional backup power capacity and an advanced antimissile system, public Air Force records and photographs examined by The Times show. The planes currently being built to serve as the permanent presidential fleet are all set to have such features, federal records show.

• The 747-8 plane was overhauled on a compressed timeline of just about eight months. Experts said the jet would have needed several years for a full upgrade.

• Because the Qatari jet was being pushed into service so quickly, some White House officials initially expected it would only be used for domestic travel or to visit allied countries with U.S. military bases.

• The government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase equipment needed to train pilots to fly the 747-8 plane so quickly, on top of the approximately $400 million cost of the upgrades that the administration has publicly acknowledged. The Pentagon has tried to mask the total price tag — including from Congress — by taking the funds from a classified budget for nuclear modernization.

The truncated overhaul of the jet came after Qatar agreed to give it to the Defense Department as a gift. It is eventually slated to go to Mr. Trump’s presidential library, an unorthodox donation that has been criticized as a way for the Middle Eastern country to curry favor with the president.

The security trade-offs of the new Air Force One burst into public view when Mr. Trump was forced to fly out of Turkey earlier this month on a different jet, a swap made at the urging of the Secret Service after officials identified a credible threat to him by Iranian proxy forces. The New York Times then reported that the new plane lacks some of the same defensive countermeasures as the previous model.

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President Trump walked off the new Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews on July 9 after attending a NATO summit in Turkey. A security threat was said to have altered his trip. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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