Air Force One-Half

The small four engine jet parked in an open hangar on the LBJ Ranch is one of the JetStars that carried Lyndon Johnson between Washington and the Pedernales, and he gave it its nickname. Any aircraft carrying the president is Air Force One, so Johnson called the Lockheed JetStar, a plane sixty feet long with room for thirteen passengers, Air Force One-Half. It was one of five JetStars in the White House fleet of the early 1960s, small enough to land on the ranch's own paved strip, which the larger presidential jet could not use, and it could taxi to within a couple of hundred yards of the house.

After Johnson's presidency the plane served the Air Force into the 1980s, and then sat for more than two decades in the aircraft boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson. The Park Service acquired it in 2010, had it restored in Kingman, Arizona, in presidential blue and gold, and brought it to the ranch that August on five trucks. It was reassembled beneath a new open hangar on the spot where it used to park, and dedicated on 27 August 2010, the anniversary of Johnson's birth. One of its pilots, James Cross, compared it with the big presidential jets as a sports car against eighteen wheelers.

Johnson kept a stranger vehicle on the ranch as well. His Amphicar, a West German car that could drive into water and float, was a favourite prank: by Joseph Califano's account the president would roll it down toward a lake with a guest aboard, shouting that the brakes had failed. The documented outings were on Lake LBJ, at Johnson's Haywood Ranch near Kingsland, some fifty miles north.