Fake News: New Air Force One NOT Ready Yet, NO Trump Interior Design Changes

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk

Several fake news websites came out with articles titled something like:

  • Trump's NEW Air Force One Just Came In, Look What Everyone Noticed That's VERY Different
  • Trump's New Air Force One Just Rolled Out, Look What Everyone Noticed That's VERY Different
  • Trump's NEW Air Force One Just Pulled Up, Look What Everyone Noticed That's VERY Different

The body of the article almost always begins like this:

The contract was up on Barack Obama's Air Force One with the expiration of his presidency. While that was just a chance of timing, President Trump stepped in to not only renegotiate the exorbitant cost of the aircraft, which came in millions higher than necessary but also took advantage of the renegotiation to make some much-needed changes to the new design. These proposed changes weren't revealed to the public until today and as soon as his plans for the new Boeing rolled out in public view, everyone immediately noticed one thing that has liberals losing their minds more than before.

(emphasis ours)

So contrary to what the title implies, the new Air Force One is still in the planning stage today (and the two planes under consideration aren't expected to fly until 2024) so the phrases 'came in', 'rolled out' and 'pulled up' in the headlines are definitely not true.

The articles also claim Trump made several design changes to make the interior of the plane way more luxurious and illustrates this with several photos. These photos actually come from a 2015 story about an unknown wealthy individual having a Boeing 747-8 Jumbo Jet converted to a private plane.

af1.jpg

Funnily enough another fake news site claimed in 2015 this was actually the interior of Obama's Air Force One.

So not only is there no new Air Force One yet, the design changes are fake news too.

The fact free article is being shared around nonetheless as you can see in the Trendolizer graph at the end of this article. If you notice anyone spreading the rumor around you can help by pointing them to this article here because nobody likes being fooled by fake news and no other hoax busting sites like Snopes have debunked this one yet. In this particular case it appears both Trump supporters and opponents are being duped into going to dodgy, ad-infested websites by the same story. Both seem to click and share without thinking because it confirms their existing ideas about Trump's tastes... Don't be fooled!

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:


  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion