An emergency escape slide suddenly inflated on the Qatar-donated Boeing 747-8, now serving as the Bridge Air Force One, prepared to carry the President of the United States to Dallas on September 9, briefly delaying his departure from Joint Base Andrews. It was an oddly familiar scene at the Maryland air base, where more than three decades back, an emergency slide had also accidentally deployed on Air Force One after President Bill Clinton arrived from Berlin, forcing him and Hillary Clinton to use an alternate staircase.
In the latest incident, a person briefed on the situation told ABC News that military personnel accidentally triggered the slide shortly before the President was due to board. He waited for about 20 minutes aboard Marine One while personnel dealt with the fully inflated escape system, which was eventually deflated, detached and hauled away before the aircraft departed for Dallas. The President said personnel were checking the emergency slide to make sure it worked perfectly and maintained that the aircraft was safe to fly. The White House referred questions about the deployment back to the President’s comments.
A surprisingly familiar mishap
The timing of the 2026 incident raises an intriguing technical question. An evacuation slide cannot simply be folded back into its housing after deployment and returned to service within a few minutes, making it highly unlikely that the aircraft received a replacement slide during the roughly 20-minute delay. The more plausible explanation is that personnel isolated the affected exit, completed the required inspection and paperwork, and released the aircraft with that evacuation station unavailable or otherwise deferred, although the Air Force has not confirmed the exact procedure. Photographs showed the older blue-and-white VC-25A moving into position behind the 747-8 during the delay, suggesting a potential fallback was being prepared, although that has not been officially confirmed either.
The affected exit was the forward right-hand door, or Door 1R, opposite the left-side entrance normally used for presidential boarding. Its evacuation system is considerably more capable than the inflatable slide might suggest, with the 747-8’s forward slide designed to extend by roughly 12 additional feet if the landing gear collapses and leaves the nose nearly 29 feet above the ground. The system is designed to deploy rapidly in an emergency, with the FAA requirement cited for such equipment calling for automatic erection within six seconds. In other words, once deployment begins, there is no convenient way to call the whole thing off.
Clinton’s 1994 mishap provides an almost surreal historical footnote. After his aircraft landed following an eight-hour flight from Berlin, the emergency slide inadvertently deployed and immediately inflated. An Air Force spokesman said there was “absolutely no danger” to passengers because the main exit was closed and an alternate exit was less than 30 feet away. The spokesman even suggested that the bright side was that the escape system had worked as advertised. Clinton later walked toward his waiting helicopter and patted the inflated slide, which was described at the time as resembling a rubber raft.
The 747 that keeps making headlines
The aircraft involved in the latest incident is approximately 14 years old and was gifted to the United States by Qatar’s royal family at a reported value of $400 million. The unprecedented foreign gift has generated questions from lawmakers and ethics experts, while the President has described the jet as “the world’s most luxurious plane” and previously said it would be “maxed out” as its presidential conversion progressed. Despite the latest disruption, the President recently revealed that he plans to continue using the Qatar-donated 747, including on his upcoming trip to Ireland, even though the aircraft still requires security upgrades.
This is not the first unusual episode involving the aircraft and presidential travel. In July, the President secretly switched aircraft while leaving a NATO summit in Turkey amid threats from Iran, with sources telling ABC News that the operation involved a catering food truck and a military aircraft. The extraordinary circumstances surrounding that departure made the 747 part of an already unusual chapter in presidential travel, and the latest incident adds another.
The irony is that the 747-8 was supposed to represent the next generation of presidential travel, yet one of its earliest memorable moments has been an evacuation slide inflating at Andrews just as one did more than three decades ago. The equipment may have become more sophisticated, the aircraft may be newer, and the circumstances may differ, but the spectacle remains remarkably recognizable. More than 11,747 days after Air Force One delayed a President, another Air Force One has been delayed by almost exactly the same thing.
