Plane Carrying Trump’s DHS Boss Makes Emergency Landing in Alarming Failure

A jet carrying a senior member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet was forced into an emergency landing in the nation’s capital after one of its engines failed midflight, the latest scare in D.C.’s increasingly jittery airspace.

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The U.S. Coast Guard aircraft was carrying Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin when it made the emergency landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Wednesday afternoon.

The incident happened at around 1:35 p.m., according to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which manages the airport, which in January last year was the scene of the deadliest commercial aviation accident in the U.S. in over two decades.

“We just lost our right engine and would like to declare an emergency and immediate landing at DCA,” the pilot of the Coast Guard jet, a GulfStream C-37A, told controllers at the facility in Potomac, Maryland, that handles traffic entering and exiting Washington’s airspace, according to an audio recording. The pilot added that they had “14 souls on board,” and about two and a half hours of fuel remaining.

Controllers guided the plane to a runway at Reagan National, where it landed safely with no disruption to other flights, the airport authority said. The C-37A, a military version of the Gulfstream V, had taken off from Lawson Army Airfield near Columbus, Georgia, roughly 90 minutes earlier, according to open-source flight tracking.

The Coast Guard, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, has previously defended requests for funding to replace one of its two long-range command aircraft.

“The current CG-101 G550 is over 20 years old, outside of Gulfstream’s service life, and well beyond operational usage hours for a corporate aircraft,” then-Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement posted online at the time. “This is a matter of safety.”

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The scare adds to a rocky stretch for the administration’s air travel. Last month, Marine One, the president’s helicopter, suffered two communications failures with the Reagan National control tower, in which controllers could not hear the pilots’ warnings that they were about to take off. Regional protocols require air traffic controllers to clear the airspace when the president’s helicopter is moving through it.

In the first episode, on Aug. 4, a controller allowed an Envoy Air commercial jet to take off from Reagan National seconds before Marine One lifted off from the Ellipse, a park south of the White House, bringing the two aircraft within less than a mile of each other.

A preliminary National Transportation Safety Board report found that Trump’s decision to take off from the Ellipse rather than the South Lawn, a switch forced by construction of his new White House ballroom, may have contributed to the breakdown.

Technicians “conducted a coverage analysis and determined that there was not adequate line-of-sight to ensure communications” from the Ellipse to the tower “while construction was ongoing at the White House,” the report said.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s Bryan Bedford said an antenna had since been relocated to fix the problem. But last Thursday, Marine One again struggled to reach the tower, and had to rely on other government helicopter pilots as go-betweens before contact was restored moments later.

Federal rules require aircraft to keep at least 1.5 nautical miles of horizontal separation, or 500 feet vertically. The White House maintains Trump was never “in harm’s way.”