Claim: During an refurbishment of the Obama campaign jet, an American flag image was removed from the plane's tail.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, July 2008]
Barack Obama recently finished a $500,000 total overhaul of his 757. And as part of the new design, he decided to remove the American flag from the tail...
What American running for President of the United States would remove the symbol of his country? And worse, he replaced the flag with it with a symbol of himself...
Origins: Given the length and breadth of modern presidential campaigns, it has become de rigueur for most major-party candidates to have their own airplanes for ferrying themselves and
staffers, press, security, and other personnel from stop to stop along the campaign trail. Such planes may be purchased by the candidate's campaign, or they may be leased or chartered from commercial airlines. Typically when a campaign owns its own airplane or leases a plane under a dedicated charter arrangement, the aircraft's exterior markings will be modified to identify it as a particular candidate's campaign plane, with some notable recent examples of this practice including aircraft used by presidential candidates Bob Dole, George W. Bush, and John Kerry, as well as current presidential candidate John McCain's "Straight Talk Express" campaign plane:
Although Senator Barack Obama flew on a variety of aircraft during the long campaign season, from March through June 2008 he primarily used a Boeing 757-200ER aircraft chartered from (and operated by) North American Airlines as his campaign plane. During that period, the plane bore the standard color scheme and company markings of a North American Airlines aircraft:
However, once the primary campaign effectively ended and Senator Obama became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, his campaign plane underwent a month-long refurbishment to prepare it for the general election campaign, a process that included reconfiguring the interior seating and modifying the exterior markings to identify and publicize the aircraft as Barack Obama's official campaign plane. The latter activity included replacing the North American Airline color scheme and markings with the Obama campaign slogan ("Change We Can Believe In"), the BARACKOBAMA.COM domain name, and Obama's sunrise/flag "O" campaign logo:
The replacement of North American's commercial markings included the removal of two stylized U.S. flag images which are used in the airline's logo (a registered trademark of that company). The North American flag/logo on the forward portion of the fuselage was removed and the one on the tail was replaced with the Obama "O" campaign logo, while traditional depictions of the U.S. flag adjacent to the plane's registration numbers remain:
Original North American version
Modified Obama campaign version
Last updated: 30 July 2008
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/airplane.asp
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