Trump aerospace industry tweets misfire.

• Author: McKinley, Craig R.
• Position: President's Perspective

President Donald Trump during the transition period leading to Inauguration Day continued to use a tactic he employed frequently during his campaign days--clearly with great mastery and greater effect--which is communicating via tweeting.

Examples of this involved the program to develop and field a new Air Force One to transport the president--a program where The Boeing Co. will likely be the prime contractor; and another questioned the costs of the F-35, a new fighter aircraft for the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and several international partners. There are numerous exceptions one can take with his December tweets on these subjects.

The Trump Organization has experience in acquiring and outfitting a commercial aircraft, operating a Boeing 757-200 that was purchased from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and then customized for Trump. The plane is reported to be worth $100 million, and that price may be the benchmark used by Trump in evaluating the cost of an Air Force One replacement.

If so, such a comparison is truly "apples to oranges." Air Force One is a much different and larger aircraft using a Boeing 747 airframe. The current Air Force One fleet, which consists of two aircraft, uses the 747-200 airframe that was in production from 1971 to 1991. In other words, today's presidential aircraft are based on a design that is nearly 50 years old, and was delivered 28 years ago near the end of the production run.

The base price of a new 747-8, the airframe to be used for the new Air Force One, is nearly four times that of Trump's 757-200, which is itself out of production. However, the new Air Force One is not "personalized," but "missionized." It adds features such as in-flight refueling, secure global communications, electronic and missile countermeasures, and other capabilities unique to the president. These essential mission enhancements are where the additional costs exist. Moreover, the government establishes these requirements, not Boeing.

As for tweets about the F-35, and Trump's reported request that Boeing price out a comparable F/A-18 alternative, the discussion is somewhat different. The F-35 has been under development since 1994 when the Joint Advanced Strike Technology program was established with the goal of producing a next-generation fighter aircraft meeting the needs of the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. As past efforts to produce a common aircraft, such as the TFX effort in the 1960's, have shown, this was--and in some...