On July 15, 1910, the Bulgarian monarch Ferdinand I was the first government leader to fly to Belgium in his own plane. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George flew across the English Channel in an Airco DH.4 for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. It was the British monarch who was to receive the first two government aircraft – Westland Wapitis – as official government aircraft and thus air transports in 1928. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first American president to fly in a Dixie Clipper and a Pan Am crew to the Casablanca Conference in Morocco in 1943. The first “government aircraft” for the President was then a Consolidated C-87 Liberal Express with the registration 41-24159, which was converted in 1943 and replaced by a Douglas C-54 Skymaster (VC-54C) with the nickname “Sacket Dow” and already had a sleeping alcove and a radio telephone on board.

Like all airplanes, government aircraft became larger and larger and – unlike today’s airline trend – more and more comfortable.