JOINT BASE ANDREWS, Maryland – President Donald Trump said Sunday night he is sending the new Boeing 747 he solicited from Qatar back for more modifications after being asked why it did not have missile defense features.

“As I understand it, in about a month or so, they’re going to send it to have it be maxed out,” he said, standing beside the plane he asked the Qatari royal family to give him within months of returning to office last January.

Trump claimed that the plane, which has already cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars for communications equipment and other alterations, “has a lot of capability,” although he did not specify which ones. “So they’re going to be sending it, and they’ll have it be maxed out. It’ll take about a month,” he said.

Trump was responding to a question from HuffPost about why he was flying a plane lacking missile defense systems. The new plane is more luxurious than the existing Air Force One 747s but is missing at least several of the anti-missile systems the current ones have.

The existing Air Force One 747s, put into service during the George H.W. Bush presidency, were built from the airframe up to serve as a presidential command post and provide transportation. Among their missile defense features are infrared light emitters mounted next to the engine and auxiliary power unit exhausts, apertures in the fuselage to eject metallic chaff and flares, and sensors to track missile launches. All three systems are for tracking and confusing heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles. All are easily visible on the existing aircraft but are absent from the Qatari plane.

What precisely Trump meant by “maxing out” is unclear. The president frequently speaks imprecisely and often makes up falsehoods on the spot.

How the missing missile defense systems can all be installed and tested in just one month is also unclear.

White House staff did not respond to HuffPost queries on the matter Sunday evening.

The Qatari jumbo jet had been on the market for a number of years when Trump asked for it. It cost $400 million new but likely was worth less than half of that at the time it was accepted by the U.S. Air Force. When it took custody of the plane last summer, officials estimated it would take two years for the necessary modifications to be completed to serve as Air Force One.

That timeline was slashed dramatically and the plane was put into service in late June, leading to speculation by aviation experts that the Air Force just forewent numerous planned steps in order to have the plane ready in time for July 4, when Trump bragged about it repeatedly and featured it in a flyover of the National Mall for the nation’s 250celebration.

Trump then took the plane to the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey – a mere 600 miles from the Iranian border and at a time when his now five-month-old war with that country was flaring up again. Trump then chose to fly one of the older Air Force 747s out of Ankara and swapped to the Qatari plane in England on the way back. At first, he claimed it was done so service members there could see it, although he later admitted that Iran was trying to kill him and that played a role in the choice to use the purpose-built Air Force version to leave the area.

Many dozens of other people fly aboard Air Force One on every flight – crew, White House staff, Cabinet members, other administration staff, guests and journalists – and Trump’s decision to fly the plane to Turkey endangered all of them. On the flight from England back to Andrews on July 8, Trump made light of it: “If I go, you go,” he told a reporter.

Trump has explained that other world leaders now have planes larger than the 35-year-old Air Force 747s and that he believed the United States president should have the largest plane.

Ironically, the reason newer, purpose-built Air Force 747s – just as large as the Qatari jet – are not yet in service is Trump himself.

He decided, as he was taking office for the first time in 2017, that the manufacturer Boeing was cheating the government and demanded a cheaper contract. The Air Force and Boeing came up with the solution of buying two completed 747s that had been abandoned when the Russian airline that had ordered them went bankrupt. That scheme quickly backfired, though, because it proved far more costly to retrofit planes than to build them as hardened command posts from the start. The two jets are now scheduled for delivery no earlier than 2028.

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