A military aide accidentally triggered an emergency slide on President Trump's Qatar-gifted Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, forcing a roughly 20-minute delay before his flight to the Republican midterm convention in Dallas.
Trump sat inside Marine One on the tarmac Wednesday with the door closed while Air Force staff wrestled the inflated slide, deployed from the right-hand-side front door of the Boeing 747, as wind whipped it across the apron. The crew eventually deflated and removed the slide, clearing the president to board and depart. A backup plane, the older blue-and-white 747 that served as the traditional Air Force One, rolled up a couple hundred meters behind the Qatari jet and deployed its own front and rear steps as a contingency.
A person briefed on the situation told Fox News that military personnel had accidentally triggered the slide. No one explained publicly how the mishap occurred or identified the aide responsible.
After emerging from Marine One, Trump spoke briefly to reporters at Joint Base Andrews and framed the delay as routine maintenance rather than an accident. The New York Post reported his exchange with the press pool:
"They were doing a check on the slide, you know, the emergency. So I think it takes about 15 minutes."
He added that the crew wanted "to make sure everything works perfectly." Asked whether he was confident the plane was safe to fly, Trump was direct:
"Yeah I am. Or I wouldn't be on it."
He then boarded the Qatari jet and flew to Dallas for the Republican midterm convention without further incident.
On a commercial airliner, repacking an emergency slide and fitting it back into its housing can take up to two days. How the Air Force crew cleared the plane for departure in roughly 20 minutes, and whether a different inspection protocol applies to military-operated presidential aircraft, remains unclear. Neither the White House nor the Air Force has publicly addressed the question.
The incident is the latest in a string of operational headaches involving the Qatar-gifted Boeing 747 that Trump adopted as his primary presidential aircraft. The plane lacks some of the anti-defense measures built into the older Air Force One, a gap Trump himself has acknowledged.
Earlier in August, Trump secretly departed the Qatari jet in Turkey via a catering truck during a NATO meeting, slipping off the plane to board a different military aircraft. Reporters traveling with him were unaware of the switch at the time. That departure also involved the right-hand-side door of the Qatari plane and occurred amid what was described as a threat from Iran.
The Turkey episode and Wednesday's slide mishap raise a practical question the administration has not fully answered: how long will the president keep flying an aircraft that his own team concedes is less protected than the plane it replaced? Breitbart noted that the slide deployment fits a repeated pattern of security concerns with the Qatar-gifted jet, which was previously sidelined after the missile-related threat in Turkey.
Trump has said the Qatari plane will go out of service for a month or two later in 2026 for security enhancements. In the meantime, he told reporters he plans to take it to Ireland "this weekend" for a short trip.
Officials have offered limited public detail about the Iranian threat that prompted the Turkey switch, and the nature of the security upgrades scheduled for later this year has not been disclosed.
The Washington Examiner reported Trump characterized the slide deployment as part of a routine safety inspection and called the plane "safe to fly," a framing that squared with his public remarks but not with the briefed source's account that the trigger was accidental.
That gap, between the president's "routine check" description and the admission that a military aide accidentally set off the slide, went unresolved Wednesday. No reporter pressed the point further before Trump boarded.
The appearance of the older Air Force One behind the Qatari jet added a visual exclamation point to the episode. The legacy 747 stopped roughly a couple hundred meters back and extended its stairs, ready to serve if the primary plane could not fly. Whether the Secret Service or the Air Force made that call, and at what point, has not been explained.
For a president who has faced repeated disruptions involving the Qatari aircraft, the backup plane's presence was a quiet concession that the newer jet's reliability is not yet taken for granted by the people responsible for getting the commander-in-chief from point A to point B.
The broader question is whether a gift plane from a foreign government, one that still needs months of security retrofitting and keeps generating tarmac delays, belongs in the presidential fleet at all. The administration has not offered a public accounting of what the upgrades will cost, who will perform them, or what specific vulnerabilities they are meant to close.
When Iranian threats against the president are serious enough to force a covert exit from the aircraft in a NATO ally's territory, the security shortfalls stop being an operational footnote and start being a policy failure someone ought to own.
Twenty minutes on a tarmac is a minor inconvenience. A pattern of security gaps on the plane carrying the president of the United States is not.
