Flying on Air Force One: Absolute, 100 % safe?

Factual Questions
21

Another major issue that you may not appreciate is that when engineers design something, they always make mistakes. To arrive at a truly reliable technology, the engineers need to design something, test it in the field in actual use for many thousands of hours, and then fix their design mistakes.

There are subtle flaws in large scale Boeing aircraft that still haven’t been discovered.

Well, Air Force 1 may be based on the chassis of a 747, some of it’s systems have potential interactions with the flight systems. And only two aircraft like this exist in the world.

Does some of that top secret comm equipment pose the risk of causing an electrical fire that could fry the flight control cables?

Do the SAM defense systems protrude into the airstream and potentially cause some other unexpected interaction? (say, by affecting air flow to a key sensor on the jet)

Did they install some accessory electrical wires in the same cable conduit that goes to the center fuel tank?

And so on. No doubt the Boeing engineers who designed the VC-25 were the best available, but even the best humans available can make mistakes. Only testing against mother nature itself (say, by building a fleet of thousands of VC-25s and testing them all) have you really tested a design.

22

I would guess that flying on Air Force One is more dangerous than flying commercially on a large aircraft.

Preventative maintenance is going to be a better on AF1, but preventative maintenance is already very good on commercial aircraft. Sure, the AF1 technicians are probably more careful, but it’s not like they have a better checklist. And it’s quite rare that something on the checklist gets skipped.

The pilots are going to be better, on average, on AF1. This is probably important, because pilot error does account for most crashes.

The risk of sabotage/attack is obviously much higher on AF1, and I expect that this is large enough to overwhelm the safety increases above. Being President is a pretty dangerous job. Four presidents have been assassinated, two others injured during assassination attempts, and many other attempts have been foiled. It’s only a matter of time until someone executes a successful attack on the presidential airplane.

23

I think you might be putting too much faith in a few things. 1. The ability for people to come up with systems and procedures that are perfect or close to perfect given enough time and money. 2. The concept that government agencies don’t care about cost or time constraints.

A major theme running through your OP is that there are no financial considerations/constraints and no bean counters nagging about costs. I’m not sure that’s correct. Government agencies have to run to a budget just like anyone else. There may be less pressure than in a commercial operation but that doesn’t mean there is no pressure. There may also be different pressures that are related to politics. I don’t know what pressures there are and I don’t imagine we would ever know but I can’t imagine they operate under some utopian no pressure environment.

Pilots

You could have the best pilots in the world in Air Force 1 but as long as they are people then they are just as likely to see a blue and black dress as white and gold or vice versa as anyone else. Once you get past a certain level of training and professionalism you are still left with the major problem with pilots which is that they are human and suffer all of the same inherent imperfections as the rest of us. The same goes with anything else to do with flight, the systems, the procedures etc. As long as people are involved then mistakes will have been made. You can’t even fix that by designing fully automatic systems, as the systems themselves are designed by people.

Safety on the ground

You can’t have “no danger” of collisions. You can have less danger, but as with pilots, as long as people are involved in the process mistakes can and will be made.

Aircraft maintenance

See above.

Weather

As much as we like to pretend otherwise, weather is not 100% predictable. No one knows exactly what the weather is like until you fly through it. It can be different for the aeroplane ahead of you and different again for the one behind you. There are no guarantees with weather regardless of how much money you’ve got.

Safety in flights

Again, there’s no such thing as “no danger”. Risks can be minimised but they can’t be eliminated. No controller wants to have a collision on their watch regardless of the aircraft involved and will do anything they can to ensure it doesn’t happen. But again mistakes can and will be made.

What could possibly go wrong?

All the same things that go wrong on other flights. The risk may be smaller (or it may not be), but you can still have mechanical failures on the aircraft, you can still have unforecast weather conditions requiring a midflight change of plans that could result in the aircraft having less fuel on board than was planned for. You can still have simple errors made by the pilots. You can still have time pressure on the pilots that forces them to make poor decisions.

If your question is “just how safe can flying be given unlimited resources?” I think the answer is first that we probably don’t know except that it will never be 100% safe and it could probably be safer than Air Force 1 with the President on board, as I doubt they have a true “no cost spared / no pressure” culture.

24

Nailed it.
Life is not 100% guaranteed.

25

Exactly, that part they replaced because it had a thousand hours on it might have last a billion hours. The one they replaced it with might only last 15 minutes…

Does the POTUS have an in-air evacuation plan? If the plane is like on fire, or comes apart in mid air, is there a dedicated parachute for him and another guy whose job it is to push the president out of the plane?

26

Lol, a flock of geese could bring that plane down faster than a SAM.

27

The current VC-25s have been flying since 1987, and in use in their current role since 1990. Even with excellent maintenance, they’ve racked up a lot of mileage and you can never tell what might go wrong.

That was discussed a bit when the movie Air Force One came out. There is a pretty clear consensus that the real AFO, unlike the Hollywood one, does not carry an escape pod (although the Air Force has refused to say IIRC). The President is not, to my knowledge, trained in parachute use, and it would be pretty damn risky for him to use one in an emergency - even assuming that the aircraft would be going slowly enough at the time for him to do so.

William Manchester told the story of a reporter jokingly asking JFK while on AFO, “What would happen if the plane went down?” The President thought for a moment and said, “Your name would appear in the paper the next day, but in very small print.”

28

They just picked a 747-8 for the next Air Force one. They news said one reason it was picked was due to 4 engines. Not many planes these days have 4.

29

About the maintenance. Here in Mexico, we lost some good people. They were stirring the political pot, and their helicopter crashed. There were suspicions that the maintenance people might have sabotaged it.

Is there a check and re-check system with AF1 maintenance? So, that these things might not happen?

30

Russell Williams was one of Canada’s most decorated military men. The former Colonel flew air force transports with high profile dignitaries as passengers - heads of state, royalty, Prime Minister etc.

And as it turns out, during his spare time, he was also a rapist and murderer. Amongst the most deviant and evil men this country has ever seen.

He obviously passed the highest level security clearances and psychological testing. Until his arrest.

31

Even in budget airlines, no one takes off with poor pilots or a defective plane on a whim. If you read the detail of the accident reports, there are always complex organisational factors behind the “coal-face” events.

AF1 would be subject to very different organisational pressures to an operating airline, but that doesn’t mean that these pressures couldn’t be maladaptive. One potential example is prestige. Imagine a president sitting at the airport because at the last minute neither AF1 or its backup is available. What sorts of incentives does this create not to believe that the aircraft is unsafe?

“Scenario: Due to a miscommunication combined with an unexpected weather system, the backup is out of position. AF1 going through preflight check has a faulty indicator, but the necessary part is locally available. They slow down the President at her current function to buy half an hour. The part turns out not to be the right one because of one of AF1’s slight divergences from the regular fleet. It’s not on the flight critical list, so they arrange to do the repair at the next stop. Meanwhile unbeknownst to the crew …”

The level of confidence in AF1 safety, and the associated reputation of the flight crew and maintenance organisation, are exactly the sorts of things that prevent contrary evidence about safety to be gathered and believed. How often does AF1 take off with minor maintenance issues, and how free are people to speak about the occasions when it does?

32

Actually, the elder Bush was trained in parachute use and bailed out during WWII - but that training had nothing to do with him being PotUS.

33

I don’t know where this idea that coat is not a factor is coming from. Based on my experiences in government, it’s basically the opposite. Budget are tight across the government, and nobody has a free license to spend.

34

Post snipped, italics, mine.

No, not the best pilots there are; remember, this is flown by the Air Farce.
[/interservice snark]

35

Something occurred to me. Air Force 1 probably carries flares as a counter-measure against heat-seeking missles. Isn’t there a non-zero chance that some kind of malfunction, or static buildup, or something might cause a flare to ignite by accident? A burning flare within the body of the jet would be… unfortunate.

36

Yeah, I hope the flares are specially sealed in some sort of super-heat-resistant compartment designed to withstand the burn of a malfunctioning flare long enough for the plane to land safely.

37

And this is the story of lots and lots of disasters from airline crashes to ships sinking to nuclear plants failing. It’s always “this part should have been replaced, but because of X they waited, then it failed, which would have been ignorable except for condition Y which was pretty unusual. But that would have been OK if only the crew had decided on action Z or W. Instead they tried Q, which would have solved the problem only they didn’t know about problem K and so Q made things even worse. By that time it was too late to go back to Z or W, so they had to try C, which would only work if B also happened, but unfortunately…”

38

The idea of commercial pressure is a little beside the point anyway. What matters is not so much the actual pressures from management down to the line pilots, but more the pressure they perceive themselves to be under. You might have an airline that has minimal pressure about say on time performance, but due to misunderstandings by the crews and a bit of hearsay/rumour a line culture can develop where the crews feel there is significant pressure on them to be on time.

The point is that it’s not so much the pressure put on pilots by other people that counts, it’s the pressure they put on themselves. Sometimes it is a legitimate transfer of external pressure but often it is not. An Air Force crew might be told over and over that it’s “your call” and “if you don’t want to fly, don’t fly”, but when it comes to getting the President to where he needs to be, they’re probably quite capable of putting themselves under their own pressure to perform.

The best, most self-aware crews will recognise when they’re doing this and hopefully force themselves to take a step back and have a rethink, but the risk is still there.

39

President is one of if not the riskiest job in the US. 9% of all people who have held the job have been murdered while in office, 16% have been shot and 20% have been shot at. All told, 34% have had assassination attempts that we know of. A few non shooting came close (Bill Clinton nearly blown up by Osama Bin Laden, but quick intelligence rerouted his motorcade; GW Bush had a live grenade thrown at him that might have been successful if the handkerchief wrapped around it hadn’t delayed the fuse from starting.

40

Bumped.

The latest developments on the next possible AFOs: http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/01/politics/us-air-force-one-bankrupt-russian-airline/index.html

The OP notwithstanding, costs clearly are a consideration.