JOINT BASE ANDREWS, Md. — The part worth watching Wednesday afternoon was not the emergency slide hanging off the president's new airplane. It was the old airplane coming out of the hangar behind it.
Start with the slide, because that is what everyone photographed. The Boeing 747 that Qatar's royal family gave the United States, a $400 million aircraft the Air Force retrofitted and now flies as Air Force One, sat on the tarmac with a yellow inflatable emergency slide extended from its front right door. That is the opposite side from the door the president uses. He boards on the left. So the slide was never in his way. It was only in every photograph.
It was also not how a slide normally gets checked. ABC News, whose reporters were at the tarmac and put questions to the president there, reported that slides are not typically tested by deploying them before a flight, because getting one back into the airplane is slow work.
President Donald Trump was aboard Marine One, which had landed on the tarmac and then stayed shut. He remained inside for about twenty minutes while the press pool stood at its rope line photographing a helicopter with the shade pulled down.
Then the older Air Force One rolled out of its hangar.
It moved into position a few hundred yards behind the newer jet and lowered both its front and rear stairs. No published account of the afternoon says who ordered that, or why.
The helicopter door eventually opened. Trump walked over to the reporters, told them there had been no emergency aboard the aircraft, and explained the slide.
"They were checking it before, and they just wanted to make sure," he said. "They want to make sure everything works perfectly."
A reporter asked whether the plane was safe to fly.
"Yeah, I am," Trump said. "Or I wouldn't be on it."
The question was about the aircraft. The answer was about the passenger. It is also the only assessment of that aircraft anyone put on the record. Asked about the deployment, the White House pointed back to the president's remarks.
Air Force personnel pulled the slide off the plane and hauled it away on the back of a pickup truck. The 747 left for Dallas, where Trump delivered the keynote address to the Republicans' first-ever midterm convention that night. The spare plane went back in the hangar.
Which leaves the afternoon's actual record at this: a slide came out of a door the president does not use, by a method nobody uses to test slides, and a second Air Force One was brought out and put away again without a word. Everything took off on time.