US vice presidential candidate’s jet makes emergency landing

A faulty 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, suffered a mid-air malfunction and made an emergency landing in Wisconsin on Saturday. The incident came 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 charter aircraft dubbed ‘Trump Force Two’ – and took off for his home state of Ohio. Within minutes of takeoff, however, the pilot declared an emergency and returned to Wisconsin’s biggest city, where the plane was inspected by ground crew and firefighters.

“The pilot advised there was a malfunction with the door seal. As soon as the issue was resolved, the plane returned to its originally planned flight path back to Cincinnati,” Vance’s spokesman, Taylor Van Kirk, said in a statement. The breakdown delayed the flight by around an hour.

Earlier this month, ‘Trump Force One’, a Boeing 757-200 owned by the former president’s company, was diverted on the way 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 around 140 miles (225km) apart.

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Trump’s plane makes emergency landing

Airport officials in Billings blamed the diversion on unspecified “mechanical issues,” while Trump made no mention of the incident in a video address released on social media shortly afterwards. Trump continued on to Bozeman aboard a small private jet.

Vance’s emergency landing is the latest in a series of safety incidents to have plagued Boeing aircraft. Five years after a malfunctioning stability system downed two 737 MAX 8 aircraft, killing 346 people, the mid-air blowout of a 737 MAX 9 door panel dragged the company’s name back into the headlines in January. 

As more potentially catastrophic flaws in Boeing aircraft continued to emerge, the company agreed in July to pay a fine of $243.6 million and plead guilty to fraud for its attempts to conceal faults with the stability system responsible for the 2018 and 2019 crashes.