The new Air Force One, a Boeing 747 that the country of Qatar gave to the United States, is being taken out of service for about a month to get safety and security upgrades, President Donald Trump said Sunday, July 20, 2026. Good Morning America

Trump announced this one day after he stepped off the plane on July 19. He said the jet would be "maxed out" with security features during the upgrade period, according to ABC News Politics. The plane is worth $400 million and was a gift from Qatar. It was fixed up to replace the old Boeing 747s that have carried presidents for 36 years, per AP News.

NPR reported on July 21, 2026, that the aircraft is being removed from service for safety upgrades. The NPR report, by Leila Fadel on Morning Edition, noted that Trump flew the new Air Force One to Turkey earlier in July before the decision to ground it. That raises questions about whether the plane was safe during that trip. NPR

Reuters reported on June 19, 2026, that the U.S. Air Force skipped some planned upgrades to the Boeing 747 before it joined the Air Force One fleet. Trump showed off the aircraft around that same date as it was nearly ready for use, per Reuters.

Qatar's gift of the plane raised ethical and security concerns from the time the plan was first reported by AP News in May 2025. The Pentagon accepted the aircraft anyway. ABC News

The timeline is short. According to Reuters, the Air Force skipped some upgrades that would normally happen before a plane enters the presidential fleet. The jet then entered service. Trump used it for a trip to Turkey. Days after returning, he said it would be grounded for about a month for more upgrades, which he described as maximizing its security features.

That sequence, reported by NPR, Reuters, and ABC, leaves open the question of what specific problems led to the grounding and whether the upgrades the Air Force skipped earlier this year are the same ones being installed now. The reporting does not explain what the safety upgrades are, beyond Trump's description.

What the record does show is that a $400 million gifted plane, accepted despite ethical concerns and moved into service faster than usual, is now being pulled from presidential use less than two months after it was unveiled and within weeks of carrying the president on an international trip. The grounding was announced by the president, not by the Air Force. The public record does not yet include a statement from the Air Force about the technical reasons for the upgrades or the safety review that supported flying the plane before the work was done.

The broader context here is that replacing the presidential aircraft has been a long and difficult process, and the Qatari gift was meant to serve as a temporary fix for the aging fleet. A grounding for safety upgrades this early in the plane's service, whatever the reason, will add to the questions that have surrounded the gift from the start.

For congressional oversight staff, the key questions are whether the skipped upgrades directly caused the need for this grounding, what safety review supported using the plane for the Turkey trip, and whether the one-month timeline Trump gave is based on an Air Force engineering estimate or a political guess. The Air Force's June decision to shorten the upgrade process, as reported by Reuters, will likely be a focus of any oversight investigation.