What life is like aboard America’s doomsday plane

By David Rennie

Reporting has taken me to many strange places. The oddest is the National Airborne Operations Centre, the doomsday plane that carries American defence secretaries around the globe. A specialised version of a Boeing 747, known as an E4-B, its white and blue hull is studded with odd bulges and domes, concealing the gadgets needed to run a nuclear war from the air. Over the years the plane – or to be precise, planes, as the US Air Force runs four of them, each nearly identical – has carried me to more than a dozen countries as a member of the small travelling press corps that accompanies the civilian head of the Pentagon overseas. Add together the flights I have taken on the E4-B, some as long as 19 hours, and I have spent weeks of my life aboard, most of them in the windowless conference room used to house the press, fitted with banks of computers and secure telephones that military officers and political leaders would use in the event of a war.

Most of the aircraft is off-limits to us, though on long trips the press may be invited to the secretary’s cabin in the nose for off-the-record talks. This article is being tapped out on a plane which, built in 1975, is older than many of the crew. It has a distinctly retro, late-cold-war feel, from the secretary’s padded-leather swivel seats, which would not shame a Bond villain, to the military-issue urinals bolted on the walls of the bathrooms (these drain straight into the sky, to avoid filling up the septic tanks on long flights).