True. I still got a chuckle out of his teasing the French about their president’s “little airplane.” I live in Denver, and I have to say that the coolest arrival by a world leader was during the Denver Summit of the Eight, held in the late-90’s, when Tony Blair arrived via the Concorde.
A little known fact about that gathering was that Boris Yeltsin’s IL-96, which looked like almost a direct copy of an A340, barely made it off the ground on departure from Denver before running out of runway. Don’t know if he loaded it down with Denver microbrew beer, or the crew forgot about Denver’s elevation, or both, but his aircraft wasn’t far above the approach lights on the opposite end of the runway (it was Runway 25 if anyone is familiar) as it passed over them. And that Runway is 12,000’ long.
Russians.