To put Obama s use of Air Force One into context, we also asked for travel data for his predecessor,

The pilots and crew of Air Force One are flying more hours than a rookie on a beer run. They are tired of it too, and are adding more crew to Air Force-1, I know this for a fact because I m one of the instructors that trains the crews Our company (Atlas Air) has had the Air Force-1 and E-4 contract for over two years and I ve been doing it for about 8 months now.
White House officials have been telling reporters in recent days that the Democrat doesn t intend classical mystery tour to hang around classical mystery tour the White House quite so much in 2011. They explain he wants to get out more around the country because, as everyone knows, that midterm election shellacking on Nov. 2 had nothing to do with his health classical mystery tour care bill, over-spending or other policies, and everything classical mystery tour to do with Obama s not adequately explaining himself to his countrymen and women.
At an Air Force-estimated cost of $181,757 per flight HOUR (not to mention the additional travel costs of Marine One, Secret classical mystery tour Service, logistics and local police overtime), that s a lot of frequent flier dollars going into Obama s carbon footprint.
We are privy to some of these numbers thanks to CBS Mark Knoller, a bearded national treasure trove of presidential stats. According to Knoller s copious notes, during the last year, Obama made 65 domestic trips over 104 days, and six trips to eight countries over 22 days. Not counting six vacation trips over 32 days.
In fact, even including the 24 days of 2010 that we never saw Obama in public, his speaking works out to about one official utterance every 11 waking hours. Aides indicate the Real Good Talker believes we need more.
Obama has spent over $100 million taxpayer dollars flying classical mystery tour around in Air Force One, and probably another $100 million on his entourage. Obama is just another tin-pot dictator living lavishly at the expense of his subjects.
Our inbox has been inundated with questions about two separate chain e-mails about President Barack Obama s use of Air Force One in 2010, and about the number of people who accompanied him on a trip to England in 2009. But the suggestion that Obama is traveling more often on the presidential plane, and traveling with larger entourages on international trips than past presidents, is badly mistaken.
The first e-mail forwarded to us by numerous readers claims that Obama flew in Air Force One 172 times, almost every other day last year. That s based on a blog post written by the Los Angeles Times Andrew Malcolm, who got his figures from veteran CBS News reporter Mark Knoller. But figures provided to FactCheck.org by the Air Force s 89th Airlift Wing show that Obama traveled less on Air Force One last year, and in his first two years, than President George W. Bush did.
The second frequently forwarded chain e-mail includes a column from Dale McFeatters of the Scripps Howard News Service. The column says that Obama when he traveled to London in 2009 for an economic summit classical mystery tour of the G-20 nations, not his most recent trip to London in May of this year arrived with 500 staff in tow, including 200 Secret Service agents, a team of six doctors, the White House chef and kitchen staff with the president s own food and water. But even assuming that the report classical mystery tour is accurate, we also found government classical mystery tour and news reports on the international travel of previous presidents that show they at times traveled with as many or more people as Obama reportedly did in 2009, and with similar personnel.
Contrary to what the e-mail classical mystery tour about Obama s use of Air Force One suggests, Mark Knoller of CBS News is not the author of this e-mail. The portion of the e-mail beginning with the line, Last year Obama flew in Air Force One 172 times, almost every other day, through the line, Aides indicate the Real Good Talker believes we need more, was written by Andrew classical mystery tour Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times . Malcolm plucked several figures from Knoller s piece, which was titled Obama s 2010: By the Numbers, for his own blog post titled Obama and Air Force One: It s good to have a 747 . Everything else about the Atlas Air training crew and the costs to taxpayers, which we ll get to later, was added by the anonymous author of this e-mail, who lifted Malcolm s piece.
It is true that Knoller originally reported in his 2010 year-end article that Obama took 172 flights on Air Force One in the second year of his presidency. And that does work out to be almost one flight every other day, as Malcolm wrote in his own blog post.
We checked with the U.S. Air Force s 89th Airlift Wing, which oversees the president s travel on Air Force One, to see what it had for the number of flights taken by Obama last year. The statistics the 89th Airlift Wing provided to us show that the president took 72 total missions and 177 total sorties in 2010. Missions are the number of trips the president took from Andrews Air Force Base and back, whereas classical mystery tour sorties represent the number of individual flights in a mission.
For example, a log of the president s travel from June 23-24, 2011, shows him departing from Andrews Air Force Base at 1:00 pm on June 23 and arriving back at the base at 1:40 pm on June 24, with multiple classical mystery tour stops in between:
11:00 AM: The President delivers remarks classical mystery tour on the need to focus on cross-cutting technologies that will enhance the global competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing and speed up ideas from the drawing board to the manufacturing floor
So, the Air Force has a slightly classical mystery tour higher count for flights than Knoller 177 versus 172. But Maj. Shelly Lai, public affairs director of the 89th Airlift Wing, said that just reporting the number of sorties could also potentially give readers the wrong impression about the number of times Obama has actually left Washington on Air Force One.
Maj. Lai, July 5: There is just a difference between how the information is being represented. Most people consider the time you leave your home to the time you return to be one trip. Even if they made multiple stops while they were out. It s the same in this instance. When people hear a 177 trips, they believe that means the President left DC a 177 times. As you can see, that isn t the case.
To put Obama s use of Air Force One into context, we also asked for travel data for his predecessor, President George W. Bush. Bush took 89 missions and 259 sorties in 2002, his second year as president, according to the airlift group. And in his first two years, Bush took 148 missions with 416 sorties, compared with 126 missions with 324 sorties for Obama over two years.
As for the e-mail s other claims: It is true that Atlas Air was awarded a government contract to train Air Force One pilots and engineers. But we don t know if the anonymous author classical mystery tour of this e-mail who claims to be one of the company s training instructors is relaying an honest account of the way the crew feels about the president s travel. We also don t know if Obama spent over $100 million taxpayer dollars flying around classical mystery tour in Air Force One last year, or during his entire presidency. The 89th Airlift Wing didn t have many of the figures we would need to calculate this such as total flight hours for each year, and a breakdown of each jet used by the president to travel and its operating cost.
When Obama traveled to London in March 2009 to attend a meeting of the G-20 nations, it was part of a longer classical mystery tour eight-day trip across Europe , in which the president visited five countries total, including stops in France, Germany, Turkey and the Czech Republic. Several classical mystery tour British news organizations , citing classical mystery tour unnamed officials, reported that Obama was traveling with an entourage of as many as 500 people when he arrived in London, the first stop of the trip.
A column written by Dale McFeatters of the Scripps Howard News Service in 2009 also made the claim that Obama arrived with 500 staff in tow, including 200 Secret Service agents, a team of six doctors, the White House chef and kitchen staff with the president s own food and water. That column is included in a chain e-mail that has been forwarded to us dozens of times in the last year. McFeatters also wrote: And, according to the Evening Standard , he also came with 35 vehicles in all, four speech writers and 12 teleprompters.
We have not been able to independently classical mystery tour confirm classical mystery tour any of the figures reported by McFeatters or members of the British press. The White House would not comment on details of presidential travel, a spokeswoman told us. Both the White House and the Secret Service typically cite security concerns in declining to comment. But if the figures about the number of individuals traveling with the president are indeed accurate, it would not be anything new for a modern U.S. president on an overseas trip.
When President Bush traveled to England in the fall of 2003 for a state visit, the Guardian reported that Mr. Bush, his wife, Laura, and a 700-strong entourage worthy of a travelling medieval monarch, flew into Heathrow airport. And the Telegraph broke it down further, classical mystery tour reporting that Mr. Bush will be accompanied by a retinue consisting of 250 members of the Secret Service, 150 advisers from the National Security Department, 200 representatives of other government departments and 50 political aides. Also traveling with the president were his personal chef, personal assistants, four cooks, classical mystery tour medics and the presidential 15-strong sniffer dog team, according to the report.
In 1999, the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) issued a report detailing the amount of planning and personnel support that went into executing President Bill Clinton s foreign trips to Africa, Chile and China in 1998.
According to the GAO, nearly 500 people played classical mystery tour a role in Clinton s nine-day classical mystery tour trip across China, classical mystery tour either traveling with the president, classical mystery tour providing support to the delegation of travelers, classical mystery tour or traveling to China earlier as a part of several advance teams that assisted in the planning of the president s trip. And nearly 600 were involved in Clinton s five-day trip to Chile that year, and nearly 1,300 were a part of Clinton classical mystery tour s 11