"For the first 117 years of the nation's existence, Presidents never ventured far. Unsure of the legality of being "President" outside the country, the first century of Presidents carefully remained within the nation's borders. William McKinley agreed in 1901 to meet the Mexican President, but on the border of the two countries. It wasn't until Theodore Roosevelt's trip to Panama in 1906 that a President ever traveled internationally -- and he did so as quickly as possible, sprinting aboard a U.S. Navy ship to the Canal Zone and remained out of territorial waters for only ten hours...
FDR's journey by lumbering Pan Am Flying Boat from Miami to Casablanca made him the first President to travel by air, to fly abroad, and the first to set foot in Africa. Ironically, the President flew because the Secret Service and the military deemed it safer than facing the marauding Nazi U-boats in the North Atlantic. It was a difficult and time-consuming trip: four legs of flying, three stops, and three days' travel each way. All told, FDR spent nearly ninety hours in the air for a trip that today Royal Air Maroc accomplishes in about eight hours. That journey gave rise a few weeks later to the Army Air Corps' decision that the President should have his own airplane. For the long flight to Yalta in February 1945 to meet Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin as the war wound down, Roosevelt first boarded his four-engine Sacred Cow, a DC-4 aircraft painted standard Army olive drab and heavily modified to include a spacious Presidential suite and an elevator to lift his wheelchair in and out...
[Harry S.] Truman quickly picked up the air travel habit, boarding Sacred Cow just weeks after he took office to fly home to Independence, Missouri -- the first domestic flight in Presidential history. From that moment forward, Presidents seemed to be in near-constant states of travel. Walt Disney offered to design a special insignia for the plane -- a smiling cow with a halo over one horn and an Uncle Sam top hat over the other -- and it began to be bedecked with the flags of the countries it had visited: a total of fifty-one by the time it was retired in July 1947.
When Truman's second plane, a DC-6 named Independence after his hometown, was delivered, the designers at Douglas decked it out with an eagle motif, incorporating the cockpit windows as the bird's eyes, and painted a golden beak on the plane's nose.
As the Cold War deepened, [CIA Director] Allen Dulles pushed [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower to adopt a jet plane -- it was critical, he argued, that the U.S. President be seen leading technological advances -- and the fact that [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev used jet aircraft meant it was time to retire the Presidential propeller planes...
The increasingly advanced and elaborate Presidential planes were decked out with survival gear like parachutes -- always five more than the passengers it carried, in case panicky officials deployed theirs inside the cabin accidentally. When the planes flew over oceans, Navy and Coast Guard ships were stationed in advance every 250 miles on picket duty in case of trouble. Later, as aviation technology advanced, Air Force rescue planes known as "Duck Butts" would accompany the President's plane, stocked with rescue swimmers, life rafts, and medical personnel who could aid survivors if the plane went down at sea."
-- Garrett M. Graff on the early history of air travel by the Presidents and the first dedicated Presidential planes, as well as some fascinating details about security precautions for Presidential flights during the Cold War, via Graff's excellent 2017 book Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While the Rest of Us Die (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), which is one of my favorite books of the past 10 years.
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