Every now and then, the pilot of a commercial airliner becomes incapacitated. Since commercial planes are usually manned with two pilots, the other pilot can take over. But AFAIK, this means that the flight is cut short and has to land at the nearest airport.
How many pilots are on board Air Force One with the President? One would assume more than two because they want to play it really, really, really safe.
All I’ve been able to find looking around is that there is a pilot and a co-pilot. The pilot is a colonel and the co-pilot a lieutenant colonel.
I’ve read (no cite) that no commercial plane has ever had both the pilot and co-pilot incapacitated a la Airplane! (sorry, no cite). So it’s probably not necessary.
It may be classified info whether there are more more trained pilots for the aircraft on board, but I can’t even find *that *anywhere. I would not be surprised at all to learn that some other officer who is authorized and trained to fly the aircraft is on crew in some other capacity.
With the older Bush they had an extra.
This page has a phone number. You could call and ask (not today - Andrews is closed to non-essential personnel because of Sandy).
There were several incidents recently in Germanyin which both pilots became unwell.
In one case, both pilots had almost passed out and landed the plane by the skin of their teeth.
In the very unlikely event that both the pilot and co-pilot were incapacitated during flight, given the number of military personnel in the president’s entourage I would imagine there’s someone else who could land the plane if their lives depended on it. It would be far from optimal, but I’m pretty sure they could talk a former fighter pilot through the landing procedures. And as someone already mentioned, both Bushes were pilots earlier in their lives (although I’m not sure how landing a 747 compares to landing an Avenger on an aircraft carrier).
It’s an entirely different kind of flying, altogether.
“It’s an entirely different kind of flying”
“It’s an entirely different kind of flying.”
Beat me to it.
Furthermore not all commercial flights have a co-pilot, I’ve been on scheduled airline flights within the UK with only one pilot, and I would imagine that in the USA with all those fields in the middle of nowhere where flying is the only sensible option those beech 1900s and so on are routinely flown with one pilot (although I do not know that).
The joke works better as a simulpost anyways. 
And yeah, you’re not likely to find this information handy. Even if it’s not Classified, it’s the exact sort of information they’d keep a lid on for Operational Security reasons (the basic gist of OpSec is that just because a bit of info is not Classified, doesn’t mean you have to make it easy for the bad guy to get it).
And really, for something like the VC-25 (the rigged-out 747 that the President normally - but not exclusively - flies in, I’d rather hope for a Heavy pilot than a Fighter pilot. That is, someone with more experience on the heavier airframes, such as the KC-135 (also based on a Boeing airliner design, albeit a smaller, older one), the C-17, or C-5. But probably any experienced pilot with a multi-engine rating would be able to get the gist of it with some control tower assistance.
I’d be more concerned about the possibility of whatever incapacitated both pilots potentially incapacitating the passengers as well, or otherwise making the cockpit unsafe for anyone else to occupy.
In any case, on a jet that big, it would be trivial (I presume) to have a relief crew on board, especially for longer transoceanic flights.
Many of the trips taken by the President are long tours, not short round-trip flights. So wouldn’t a relief crew also be carried on the plane? Or would they fly on other support aircraft?
And the younger Bush as well. Remember how he arrived to stand in front of that MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner?
Charles is a prat.
