Travel: Aboard Ronald Reagan’s Air Force One

The President putts aboard his favorite plane.

(Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation)

Ronald Reagan fondly pronounced his Air Force One “a better office than any I have.” He loved his flying White House—specifically the plane with the tail number 27000—and flew it more than any other President from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. Now you can go aboard it too.

It served the old Hollywood actor as a kind of moving stage, where he sometimes played the diplomat and sometimes the Cold Warrior. It was 27000 that took him to Reykjavik and Moscow to meet face-to-face with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. And it was 27000 that took him to Berlin in 1987 to challenge Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!”

He logged 661,708 miles on the plane in his eight years as President, traveling to 150 American cities and 26 foreign countries. It carried him and Nancy Reagan to Washington for his first inauguration, in 1981, and bore them home to California when their White House days came to a close, on January 20, 1989.

No wonder he wanted to take the plane with him—literally. He envisioned it as a centerpiece of his presidential library, and he finally got his wish. But it took 14 years and an eventful midnight journey over four Southern California freeways—plus one flat tire—before it made a final triumphant ascent through the fog-shrouded hills of Simi Valley to retirement at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

Something of the thrill that the fortieth President felt on boarding Air Force One is an experience you can now share. And no one really needs to tell you what to do when you climb the stairs, turn at the door flung open to reveal the presidential seal, and face the crowd below. You’ve seen every President since John F. Kennedy stand in the doorway of that distinctive blue, white, and silver livery, and you know what’s expected.

“Wave!” instructs a library photographer ($11.74 buys you a five-by-seven glossy color photo), but you’re already waving. Duke Blackwood, the executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Foundation, says that one of his favorite pastimes is to sit at the entryway of the 87,500-square-foot glass pavilion where visitors, having crossed a footbridge from the museum exhibits, first catch sight of the plane. He’s there to “watch their jaws drop.” Air Force One has that kind of hold on the American imagination, presidential families included. “Look at me, I’m riding on Air Force One!” a delighted Nancy Reagan exclaimed on her first trip.

The plane is mounted on three reinforced-concrete pedestals and angled at a two-degree upward tilt. The nose is aimed at a breathtaking transparent wall. “It’s a third of an acre of glass, 1,142 feet above sea level,” Blackwood says. From within the pavilion, a majestic vista of rolling hills is visible just beyond, appearing to line up the plane’s flight path. To Blackwood, “It looks like it’s taking off on one final flight of freedom and democracy.”

But anyone who has seen the technological flying marvel depicted in the 1997 movie Air Force One, starring Harrison Ford as the nation’s battle-ready Chief Executive, will find Reagan’s plane modest by comparison. For starters, it is a Boeing 707 that made its debut presidential flight when Nixon flew to Chicago in 1973 for the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention.

If we could tour the planes that entered the presidential fleet in the 1990s, numbers 28000 and 29000, they would look more like that Hollywood plane—two Boeing 747-200B jumbo jets as high as a six-story building and with fuselages the length of a football field. Not that 27000, relegated to back-up status after the arrival of 28000, wasn’t impressive for its time. It was, in fact, state of the art, with a cruising speed of 540 miles an hour, a range of 6,650 miles, a service ceiling of 42,000 feet, and a wingspan stretching 145 feet 9 inches. On the floor of its communications center, sharp-eyed visitors will recognize a replica of the nondescript “football” briefcase containing the nuclear codes that accompanied the President whenever he left the White House—a stark reminder of the awesome power and responsibility of Air Force One’s passenger-in-chief.

Reagan’s plane recreates the 1980s, and it offers a glimpse of the man himself. Along with the ubiquitous crystal jars of jellybeans are also a fax machine (to the immediate right of the main cabin door), oddly oversized digital clocks tracking the time in Washington and at local destinations, a television equipped with a VCR, and an IBM Correcting Selectric II typewriter once used by Reagan’s secretary.

The President’s forward-cabin stateroom is all business, with a Bonn Economic Summit briefing book from May 1985 propped on a shelf. Draped over the President’s chair is Reagan’s flight jacket, with its Air Force One patch, and on the desk is a lined yellow notepad bearing his copious notes. It’s as if Reagan, a prolific writer, had just put down his pen.

You’ll find gold-and-white presidential china in the galleys, but you might overlook the chocolate cake (or a stage prop version, anyway). It seems Reagan insisted a cake be on hand at all times, in the event of an onboard birthday. “It was Ronald Reagan’s favorite,” says Jim Sunderland, a volunteer guide. “Any excuse to have chocolate cake.”

The first Chief Executive to take to the air was Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, the year after he left office. A surviving film shows him happily waving his hat to onlookers from aboard his perch on a Wright brothers plane. His cousin Franklin was the first sitting President to fly overseas, and Dwight D. Eisenhower the first to fly on a jet. But as Von Hardesty details in his book Air Force One: The Aircraft That Shaped the Modern Presidency, it was Kennedy who, in 1962, received the first jet exclusively designated for the President, SAM (Special Air Mission) 26000. The name Air Force One, used since the mid-1950s, began to come into popular use with his administration, and it refers to any Air Force plane that the President is aboard at the moment. It was by JFK’s order that the President’s plane first carried the words “United States of America” on its fuselage. And it was his First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, who hired the industrial designer Raymond Loewy to reimagine the look of presidential air travel.

Hardesty describes Loewy down on the floor of the Oval Office with colored paper and crayons sketching the plane for Kennedy. His enduring blue, white, and silver color scheme, Hardesty writes, was conceived as the “stylish winged expression of Camelot,” only to tragically become the livery of Kennedy’s “improvised hearse” on November 22, 1963. The public can see 26000, along with other presidential planes, at the National Museum of the United States Air Force, near Dayton, Ohio. Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn into office on 26000 and later installed clear panels between its compartments so that he could see its other passengers and they him.

In the foreword to Hardesty’s book, the CBS Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer reveals how various Presidents made Air Force One their own. He recalls that Nixon sequestered himself in his cabin but Gerald Ford seemed happy to socialize in the press cabin, martini in hand. Reagan liked wearing sweatpants onboard, although he kept on his dress shirt, tie, and wingtips. As Schieffer puts it, Reagan “knew the place where fashion statements counted was not backstage but before the audience.”

Hardesty points out that Jimmy Carter, like other Presidents, learned the political value of an invitation to ride on Air Force One. Bill Clinton, in the air as on land, could talk a blue streak. On a 1998 trip to Ireland, according to Carl M. Cannon, National Journal’s White House correspondent, Clinton perched on the armrest of a seat in the press cabin and continued talking to reporters for so long after landing that his press secretary, Mike McCurry, finally had to shoo him off his own plane.

George W. Bush made the last presidential flight on 27000, a 334-mile roundtrip hop from Waco to San Antonio on August 29, 2001, and was on hand at the Reagan library on October 21, 2005, to see the Air Force One Pavilion dedicated. It opened to the public on October 24, and it contains a former Marine One helicopter used by Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford (instantly familiar from its green-belly-and-white-top design) and a mock-up of a motorcade featuring Reagan’s 1984 parade limousine.

In 2003 the library had 200,000 visitors. This year Blackwood expects attendance to exceed 400,000, a result partly of a renewal of interest in Reagan’s Presidency after his death two years ago (he is buried on the library grounds), and partly of the arrival of his Air Force One.

The Air Force One Pavilion was a $32 million undertaking, all paid for with private funds. Library officials learned through White House connections that 27000 would be retired in 2001 and immediately appealed to the secretary of the Air Force for guardianship of “Ronald Reagan’s plane.” It flew out of Andrews Air Force Base for the last time late in 2001. Nancy Reagan was waiting on the tarmac when it arrived at San Bernardino International Airport. It was housed in a hanger until June 2003, as the library prepared for its arrival, and when the time came to transport it, a Boeing Company crew of nine disassembled it in just over two months into five sections: fuselage, tail and stabilizers, engines, main landing gear, and wings.

Close to midnight on June 20, 2003, atop a custom-designed trailer, 27000 began a 104-mile journey to Simi Valley. Along the way, as Blackwood tells it, “We get a flat tire, stop, and fix it.” By 5 a.m., he recalls, motorists were honking and waving at the plane “chugging up the hill” in thick fog. It was towed inside the partially built pavilion in September 2004, not long after Reagan’s death, and the Boeing Company had it reassembled in 10 weeks.

But 27000’s adventures were hardly over. During the October 2004 wildfires, flames got to within a quarter mile of it. Firefighters planned to foam it and make a stand if the fire crested the hill. “Luckily, the wind shifted,” Blackwood says.

Although 27000 was safe, a news photograph of the endangered aircraft was e-mailed around the world, prompting concerned calls even from the White House. This, after all, isn’t just any plane. Hardesty, a curator with the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, describes it as not only “the White House aloft” and “a powerful symbol of the American Presidency,” but also “the image of the United States itself.”

Onboard 27000, a drawer in the communications center lies open to reveal a last notation in pen signed by Sgt. Mike Tedford and Sgt. Ed Moren of the President’s Airlift Squadron. “Our last flight,” it reads, and it is dated “8 Sep 2001.” Three days later, one of those new Air Force Ones was at the center of the national drama once again as public attention focused on President Bush’s circuitous trip from Florida back to the White House after the terrorist attacks of September 11. The route was evasive because Secret Service agents feared the plane itself might be targeted. It was, after all, both symbol and bearer of the heart of the power of the United States.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum is at 40 Presidential Drive, Simi Valley, California, and is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. For more information visit www.reaganlibrary.com or call (800) 410-8354.

—Delia M. Rios, a Washington, D.C., based journalist, has written extensively about American history and identity.