There are roughly 600,000 licensed pilots in the United States. At any given time, approximately two of them are qualified to serve as aircraft commander of Air Force One. The road to that cockpit is long, expensive, demanding, and involves a level of personal scrutiny that would make most people seriously reconsider the career path.

It is also, by universal agreement among everyone who has done it, the best flying job in the world.

You Get In By Having No Secrets Whatsoever

Candidates for the Presidential Airlift Group — the unit that operates Air Force One — come from the Air Force’s most experienced pilot ranks. The minimum requirements are substantial: thousands of flight hours, an outstanding service record, extensive large-aircraft experience, and a career trajectory so clean it practically gleams.

The minimum requirements are also, it turns out, just the entry fee.

The real filter is the background investigation. The FBI investigates. The Secret Service investigates. Air Force counterintelligence investigates. They interview family members, former roommates, college professors, and neighbors from addresses you forgot you lived at. They review financial records, travel history, and associations going back to the parts of your life you had genuinely stopped thinking about.

They are looking for leverage. Anything that could be used to compromise a person who will, at various points, be the only thing between the President of the United States and the ground.

One pilot who survived this process described it as “having your entire life read back to you by strangers, very slowly, with follow-up questions.”

If that sounds unpleasant, it is meant to be. The job requires that there be nothing — nothing — that anyone could use against you. If you have something, they will find it. Most candidates, it can be inferred, have very clean parking records.

Then Comes the Special Training

Once selected, pilots undergo training specific to the VC-25A — a substantially modified 747 that handles differently from the commercial version in ways that matter at the margins. They train for contingencies that commercial pilots never encounter: evasive maneuvers, emergency communications protocols, and procedures for classified scenarios that exist well above their previous clearance level.

They also learn the rhythms of presidential travel, which are unlike any other flight operation on earth. Compressed timelines. Political sensitivities that can change without warning. The understanding that a delayed departure is never just a delayed departure when the President is aboard, because every minute of the President’s schedule has downstream consequences that ripple through governments and motorcades and meetings that have been planned for weeks.

The Actual Job

On a typical mission, the aircraft commander is responsible not just for flying but for coordinating with the Secret Service advance team, foreign air traffic control authorities, fighter escort units, and the communications staff whose equipment fills a substantial portion of the aircraft. It is less “flying a plane” and more “operating a flying small city while also flying the plane.”

The flying itself, once airborne, is described by those who have done it as simultaneously the most routine and most consequential work of their careers. Routine because the VC-25A is, at its core, an aircraft, governed by the same physics as everything else in the sky. Consequential because of what — and who — is in the back.

You learn to hold both things at once.

They Don’t Talk About It

Presidential pilots are, as a rule, extraordinarily private. They do not write memoirs. They do not give interviews. They attend reunions of the Presidential Airlift Group and have carefully calibrated conversations about things they will not say to anyone outside the room.

What they will say, universally and without prompting, is that it was the honor of their careers.

What they will not say is everything else. Which is, when you think about it, exactly the profile you’d design if you were building the job from scratch.

Two of them, somewhere right now, are qualified to do it. The rest of us will have to content ourselves with watching the plane on FlightAware.

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