Commander-in-Chief Travel: Fun Facts for President’s Day
by Daniel McCarthyTo celebrate President’s Day, here are some facts about presidential travel, from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama.
- John F. Kennedy was the first president to use Air Force One for a transoceanic jet trip when he flew to Europe in 1962. He traveled in a modified Boeing 707. It was the first time a president flew in a jet specifically created for presidential use.
- The first president to cross the Atlantic Ocean was Woodrow Wilson, who traveled to France for the Paris Peace Conference in December 1918 aboard the U.S.S. George Washington, a World War I-era ocean liner.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to fly overseas. In January 1943, he flew in a Boeing 314 Flying Boat from Miami to Morocco, where he met in secret with Winston Churchill at the Casablanca Conference. It took three days to get there.
- Among first ladies, Eleanor Roosevelt was the first to fly in an airplane. In 1933, after a dinner at the White House with a group that included Amelia Earhart, she and the group flew from D.C. to Baltimore aboard an Eastern Air Transport plane.
- Barack Obama is the first sitting president to travel to Cambodia and Myanmar, which he visited in November 2012, as well as to Kenya and Ethiopia, which he visited this July. As of this past January, Obama had logged more than 447,000 international travel miles.
Pics: Kheel Center, Pete Souza
