By Alexandra Skores, CNN
Washington (CNN) — If you think President Donald Trump’s designs for the paint job on the new aircraft that will serve as Air Force One look familiar, you are not alone.
Last month, the Air Force confirmed the 747-800s currently being modified will wear a red, white, gold and dark blue livery nearly identical to the one proposed during Trump’s first term in office. One key difference is the newest designs have a billowing flag on the tail.
Trump’s plans for Air Force One were previously reversed by the Biden administration, which announced they wanted to paint the planes blue and white, very similar to the robin’s egg blue and white color scheme presidential transports have worn since the Kennedy administration.
The planes were not painted before Biden left office and after his inauguration Trump resurrected his chosen paint scheme. It will be applied to two new Boeing 747-800s being modified by Boeing and another Boeing 747-800 donated to the US military by Qatar. When complete, the Air Force will operate the completed planes as part of their VC-25B program.
Red, white and blue colors may not feel all that surprising for an American presidential aircraft, but the striking similarities to other planes paint jobs has not gone unnoticed.
“We’re supposed to be impressed that AF1’s new paint scheme is just an old TWA?” Congressman Eric Sorensen, a Democrat from Illinois posted on social media.
Trans World Airlines was in the process of painting its planes with a strikingly similar color scheme when it was acquired by American Airlines in 2001.
“The last paint scheme for TWA and the proposed Air Force One paint schemes are really close, I mean, really close,” Bob van der Linden, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum told CNN.
Trump’s older brother Fred Trump Jr. was briefly a pilot for TWA before he died in 1981 of complications from alcoholism.
“What he loved doing was flying airplanes,” the president told the Washington Post in 2019. “I remember being at the house and other pilots from TWA would come to the house and they’d come to work with Fred because he was a very natural talent.”
The new Air Force One paint job also has drawn some comparisons to Donald Trump’s private Boeing 757, which sports a similar, though reversed, color scheme and a flowing flag. The aircraft, which used to have a stylized T on the tail, replaced a 727 with similar colors in 2011.
Richard Aboulafia, the managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory, an aerospace management consulting firm, doesn’t believe the colors chosen for the new Air Force One were “optimal,” but they represent the man who selected them.
“It resembles Trump’s personal paint scheme, that is not too out of the ordinary,” he said.
When Trump operated an airline from 1989 – 1992 – known as the Trump Shuttle with flights from New York to Boston and Washington, DC – the planes were white with red lettering.
One similar paint scheme that likely did not figure into Trump’s designs for the new planes was that of North American Airlines.
The charter carrier flew Boeing 757s, including the campaign planes of former presidents George W. Bush in 2000 a