Tasos Katopodis/Getty; Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty; Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty
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On July 3, the “Wings of Freedom” demonstrations over the National Mall featured three hours’ worth of aerial entertainment cooked up by the Trump administration as part of the America 250 celebration. There were parachute teams, the Air Force Thunderbirds, fighter jets, helicopters, and a “tri-bomber” formation that included a B-2 stealth bomber. On Independence Day, military aircraft flew over DC every 18 minutes for nine straight hours. For some people watching the show, it was a glorious display of American military power and aviation prowess. For many who live here, though, it was a form of “noise terrorism,” according to one TikToker, who likened the celebration to living in a war zone.
During these nonstop military flyovers, locals shared stories online of pets hiding under the couch, night workers losing sleep, and the roar of low-flying aircraft setting off car alarms. Some complained that the jets recalled the terror of 9/11 after the plane hit the Pentagon. “Why are we having so many jets scorching over DC?” posted New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia Navarro during the July 3 display. “Nerve-wracking. I get 250 celebrations but it feels like the apocalypse.”
Why are we having so many jets scorching over DC? Nerve-wracking. I get 250 celebrations but it feels like the apocalypse.
— Lulu NYT (@LuluGNavarro) July 3, 2026
Enduring the occasional jet flyover comes with living in the Nation’s Capital. But none of those regular episodes compares with the martial air traffic Trump has inflicted on the city since taking office last year. “We’ve long had the ceremonial flyovers for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery,” says former local traffic reporter Dave Statter, who tracks aviation activity on his website. “But the Trump administration has brought in a new flyover era.”
“We’ve long had the ceremonial flyovers for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery, but the Trump administration has brought in a new flyover era.”
In previous administrations, the military flyover “was treated as an exception rather than the rule,” says Leon Panetta, a former member of Congress from California who served as both Defense secretary and CIA director during the Obama administration. “That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.”
Trump, who escaped the Vietnam War draft by claiming to be hobbled by bone spurs, has long shown a fascination with military hardware. He began deploying it for his own entertainment almost as soon as he took office in his first term. Trump was the first president since Harry Truman in 1949 to have a military flyover for his inauguration. (President George W. Bush had a flyover two days before his actual inauguration.)
The new president had hoped to have a Red Square-style parade, complete with tanks and missile launchers, to celebrate his unexpected electoral victory in 2016. After much opposition including from inside the military, he had to settle for a flyover that included all five branches of the military: Air Force F-35, F-16, F-22 and F-15E fighter jets, Navy F/A-18 combat jets, Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, Marine V-22 Ospreys and four MH-65 rescue helicopters. Trump had planned a repeat performance last year, but frigid weather brought his second inauguration indoors.
On one of his early foreign trips in 2017, Trump attended a military parade in Paris on Bastille Day, which seems to have inspired many of his ideas for using the military at home. “We’re going to have to try and top it,” Trump said of the parade. The Pentagon objected to involving the armed forces in a political event that would have cost nearly $100 million.
But in 2019, Trump finally got his military parade in DC, and flyovers were a highlight.
Then came the pandemic in March 2020. Six days after he went on TV to suggest that Americans might inject a disinfectant to kill the virus, Trump organized several military flyovers in the Washington area and elsewhere as a “tribute” to struggling health care workers who were on the front lines without sufficient protective gear.
If Trump’s first term was marked with an excess of military displays unheard of in the US, his second term has vastly surpassed it. “I don’t think there’s much question that this president is very interested in symbolic displays of military power,” Panetta says. “The flyover is obviously one of those symbols that has in particular attracted him.”
Indeed, Trump loves showing off American war hardware, especially to foreign leaders. During his August 2025 meeting in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a B-2 stealth bomber and four F-35 fighter jets flew overhead as they stood on the tarmac. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was implicated in the 2018 murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was honored with a ceremonial formation of F-35s and F-16 fighter jets during his White House visit in November last year. (Bin Salman has repeatedly denied any role in the killing.)
In September 2025, Trump feted the president of Poland with a White House flyover that just happened to disrupt a press conference underway nearby at the US Capitol by the victims of the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. This year, both King Charles and Chinese President Xi Jinping got the full flyby during their White House visits. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser was in the middle of a press conference at the old RFK Stadium site when she was interrupted by the flyover for Xi, which was so loud even Trump winced from the noise.
While it certainly seems like DC has suffered a lot more air space disturbance since Trump took office last year, I wondered if the actual numbers would bear it out. In August, I asked the DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency for a list of all the public advisories it issued about a scheduled military aircraft event, going back to the beginning of 2023.
The list shows that during the last two years of the Biden administration, almost all of the DC flyovers were either for veterans’ funerals—63 of them—or a sporting event, including four over Nationals park, the city’s Major League Baseball stadium. None went over the White House or were tied to state visits by foreign leaders, aside from two over the National Mall during a NATO summit.
During the Biden years, planned military flights over DC outside of veterans’ funerals were rare enough that in 2022, when the Army’s Golden Knights parachute team jumped out over Nats Park, it triggered a threat alert and the US Capitol was evacuated.
It’s hard to even quantify the exponential growth in flyovers over DC in 2026. Historically, when DC sends out a public flyover alert, it indicates the specific time and date of the event. But this year, the agency alerts have warned of flyovers happening over multiple days at a time.
Screenshot
The opening of the Great American State Fair; the 4th of July; and the DC “Grand Prix” Indy car race in August all featured multiple days of military aviation displays. But some of the most concentrated flights were scheduled around Trump’s 80th birthday celebration on June 14. The DC area suffered through multiple flyovers every day for four straight days, starting with flights over the Lincoln Memorial on June 11 and culminating on June 15 with the 12-plane formation of Thunderbirds and Blue Angels that flew over the White House just as country star Zach Brown was finishing the National Anthem at the UFC cage match.
US Air Force Thunderbirds and US Navy Blue Angels aircraft fly in a rare Super Delta formation over Washington, DC, June 14, 2026US Air Force courtesy UFC
Trump has so overwhelmed DC with air shows this year that he appears to have shut out some of the traditional “missing man” flyovers that honor veterans at Arlington Cemetery. According to DC records, by August 23, there were 27 flyovers for funerals at Arlington Cemetery in 2024, and 20 in 2023. This year, there were just 13.
The flyovers have also impacted the DC region’s normal commercial air traffic. For instance, with only two weeks’ notice, the Washington Metropolitan Airport Authority announced that Reagan National airport would close for several hours on July 3rd and all flights on the 4th would be cancelled after noon, with ongoing disruptions throughout the summer due to the flyovers.
“It’s not just the events themselves but also the rehearsals beforehand.”
“It’s not just the events themselves but also the rehearsals beforehand,” says Statter. The day before the UFC cage match in June, for instance, his wife had an early Saturday morning flight out of DCA to Boston for a final visit to a relative in hospice. Ever the traffic reporter, he checked her flight status around 1 a.m. and discovered that it had been cancelled at two hours earlier due to a flyover practice. “She had to drive to Boston,” he told me.
Of course, Trump’s love of flyovers creates bigger problems than just terrorizing DC residents or inconveniencing air travelers. Statter says that Trump is “tempting fate with so many low-flying demos or ceremonial flights.” He explained that, during his many years as a traffic reporter, pilots told him that the lower the altitude, “the less time a pilot has to correct anything that goes wrong.”
He points to the many crashes at both military and civilian air shows. Just this May, two Navy fighter jets collided mid-air during an air show in Idaho. The four pilots ejected from the planes, which crashed into a fireball on the runway. Flying in the Navy’s Blue Angels, which have regularly featured in Trump’s displays, is so dangerous that 1 in 10 of the unit’s pilots have died in crashes. But air show crashes usually happen around airfields. “Imagine one happening over a populated area like DC,” Statter says.
It’s not a hypothetical question. In March last year, a Delta flight leaving DCA for Minneapolis nearly collided mid-air with an Air Force T-38 Talon that was part of a formation headed to Arlington Cemetery for a funeral flyover. CNN reported that one of the Delta pilots believed the military aircraft was flying just 500 feet below it when the passenger plane took off. Air traffic controllers had to issue “corrective instructions” to avert disaster.
Irv Halter is a retired Air Force Major General and fighter pilot who used to be involved with ceremonial flyovers, both flying in them and later, helping to decide which ones the Air Force should approve. He says previous presidents did not demand flyovers the way Trump has, and for good reason. They “eat up resources” by tying up ground crews during launch and recovery, he told me, and requiring assistance from cargo planes, tankers and ground control assets.
Flying just one F-35 jet for an hour can cost $40,000. That’s peanuts compared to the cost of flying the B-2 stealth bomber, which has become a regular fixture in DC skies since Trump took office. The most expensive plane in the world, the B-2 cost more than $2 billion to build and as much as $150,000 an hour to keep in the air, in part because the specialized anti-radar skin on it is so expensive to replace should it, say, hit a bird. It needs anywhere between 50 to 60 hours of maintenance for every flight hour. The Air Force has fewer than 20 of them.
In the past, the Defense Department has defended the cost of flyovers by calling them training missions. “That’s BS,” Halter says. “Yes, every hour a pilot gets in an airplane is of some value.” But with all the GPS equipment on modern war planes, he says flying straight and level over something like the National Mall is “a big yawn” for fighter pilots. “And every hour you run on them now is an hour you don’t get for real training or combat training.”
The real cost of such ceremonial flights, Halter notes, “doesn’t show up as a dollar amount but as wear and tear on people. Airplanes and crews need rest. You can’t just keep pounding them into the ground.” He says using critical aircraft for so many frivolous events seems unwise “especially in the middle of a war where we’re wearing out equipment and we’re running out of stocks.”
None of this seems to concern the current administration. “After Joe Biden broke our military, President Trump rebuilt it—and he is deeply proud of his work renewing the strength of our armed forces,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told me in an email when I asked about the consequences of so many flyovers. “The United States possesses the most powerful fighting force in the world, and beautiful aircraft inspire patriotism for all who see them fly overhead.”
