A malfunctioning door seal forced J.D. Vance’s Boeing 737 to return to Milwaukee shortly after takeoff.
A Boeing 737-800 carrying GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, experienced a mid-air malfunction and made an emergency landing in Wisconsin on Saturday. This incident occurred just a week after Trump’s own jet was diverted due to a mechanical issue.
After campaigning in Milwaukee on Saturday morning, Vance boarded the jet – a chartered aircraft known as ‘Trump Force Two’ – and departed for his home state of Ohio. However, within minutes of takeoff, the pilot declared an emergency and returned to Wisconsin’s largest city, where the plane underwent inspection by ground crew and firefighters.
“The pilot reported a malfunction with the door seal. As soon as the issue was resolved, the plane resumed its originally planned flight path back to Cincinnati,” Vance’s spokesman, Taylor Van Kirk, stated. The malfunction resulted in a delay of approximately one hour for the flight.
Earlier this month, ‘Trump Force One’, a Boeing 757-200 owned by the former president’s company, was diverted en route to a rally in Montana due to a mechanical problem. The plane was heading to Bozeman, where Trump was holding a campaign rally, and made an emergency landing in Billings. The two cities in Montana are approximately 140 miles (225km) apart.
Airport officials in Billings attributed the diversion to unspecified “mechanical issues,” while Trump made no mention of the incident in a video address released on social media shortly after. Trump continued his journey to Bozeman aboard a smaller private jet.
Vance’s emergency landing is the most recent in a series of safety incidents affecting Boeing aircraft. Five years after a malfunctioning stability system caused two 737 MAX 8 aircraft to crash, killing 346 people, the mid-air blowout of a 737 MAX 9 door panel brought the company back into the headlines in January.
As further potential safety issues in Boeing aircraft continued to surface, the company agreed in July to pay a fine of $243.6 million and plead guilty to for its attempts to conceal faults with the stability system responsible for the 2018 and 2019 crashes.