The plane carrying Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made an unscheduled stop in the UK on Wednesday due to a cracked windshield. Hegseth was traveling back to the U.S. after a meeting in Belgium with NATO defense officials.
“On the way back to the United States from NATO’s Defense Ministers meeting, Secretary of War [sic] Hegseth’s plane made an unscheduled landing in the United Kingdom due to a crack in the aircraft windshield. The plane landed based on standard procedures and everyone onboard, including Secretary Hegseth, is safe,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote on X.
The Boeing C-32 made an emergency landing at Royal Air Force Mildenhall after the crack was found over southern Ireland, according to Bloomberg. The plane quickly descended to 10,000 feet when the crack was discovered, which is done in these situations over fears that the cabin will become depressurized.
The plane carrying Hegseth is a modified 757-200 passenger jet and is almost three decades old. As Bloomberg notes, the planes that carry cabinet members are often old and prone to breakdowns. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had to make a similar emergency landing back in February.
Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense to ever serve in the position, tweeted about the incident with just six short words: “All good. Thank God. Continue mission!”
Hegseth has attempted to purge the U.S. military of anyone who isn’t a white man, insisting that the Pentagon had been focused too much on DEI, a term he uses to denigrate women and racial minorities. But Hegseth has shown himself time and again to be incredibly incompetent, most notoriously when he was sharing highly sensitive information on a group Signal chat that included the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Hegseth survived that incident, as Trump values loyalty over competence. But he’s continued to prove himself a wildly paranoid and impulsive leader, firing not just military leaders he doesn’t like, but the very people he initially hired to supposedly reform the Pentagon. Reports from inside the Pentagon suggest Hegseth is obsessed with leaks and whether people close to him may be leaking to the press.
The Defense Secretary has also demanded that journalists at the Pentagon sign a kind of loyalty pledge with restrictions on the type of materials that reporters can publish, something his former employer, Fox News, has even refused to do.