Whenever planes or airports are in the news, I reach out to University of Dayton aviation historian Janet Bednarek. She’s written about security checkpoint nightmares, people who live in airports, the golden age of air travel and a string of plane hijackings.

So when news broke that President Donald Trump was planning to accept a plane valued at $400 million from the Qatari government to serve as Air Force One, I wanted to give our readers a chance to hear what she had to say.

Aside from the bad optics of welcoming a huge gift from a foreign country, she said accepting this jet would represent yet another broken norm: Presidential planes have almost always been U.S. military aircraft, flown and maintained by the Air Force.

Bednarek, who spent three years working for the U.S. Air Force’s history program, tells the story of the first presidential planes, where the call sign “Air Force One” comes from, and how Trump’s longing to obtain a “palace in the sky” to rival the planes of Arab monarchs mirrors President Richard Nixon’s insecurities over American aviation.

This week, we also liked articles about how Pope Francis raised up Latin American Catholic martyrs, what a possible change the Trump administration seeks may do to endangered species, and why you should not assume that everyone wants you to hug them.

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