US homeland chief Mullin’s plane makes emergency landing after engine failure

WASHINGTON – A Coast Guard jet carrying Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security Secretary, made an emergency landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport in the afternoon of Sept 2 after an engine failure.

It was the latest close call to occur in Washington’s congested airspace.

“The United States Coast Guard pilots made the single engine landing feel routine. No panic, just straight professionalism,” Mullin posted on social media.

“After we landed, the pilots told me that was a first for them. We could not have been in better hands.”

The event occurred around 1.35pm, according to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which manages Reagan National Airport.

“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 centre in Potomac 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 2½ hours of fuel remaining in the tank.

Controllers guided the plane towards a runway at Reagan National where it landed safely, according to the airport’s authority, which said there was no disruption to other flights.

The episode involving a Cabinet secretary was another in a string of high-profile close calls in the skies over Washington, a busy commercial flight hub regularly traversed by the highest-ranking officials in the US government.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) referred questions to the Coast Guard, which referred questions to Mullin’s statement on social media.

Safety procedures in the skies over the nation’s capital have been the subject of particularly close scrutiny since January 2025, when an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines passenger jet just outside Reagan National Airport, killing all 67 people on board both aircraft.

Since then, the FAA has taken several steps to limit who can fly helicopters through the area and increase the ranks of the national workforce of air traffic controllers. Lawmakers also have hotly debated laws to require pilots of all aircraft to carry advanced tracking technology.

In August, Marine One, the President’s helicopter, had two episodes of communications failures with the air traffic tower at Reagan National Airport, in which controllers were unable to 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 Airport just seconds before Marine One lifted off from the Ellipse, a park south of the White House, and the two aircraft came within less than 1.6km of each other.

A recent National Transportation Safety Board report found that construction at the White House, where the President has been building a huge ballroom, may have played a role in that incident.

That construction forced Marine One to move its take-off location farther from the White House temporarily, where technicians determined that the line of sight for radio transmissions with the air traffic control tower was less than optimal.

In the wake of the episode, FAA administrator Bryan Bedford said that an antenna had been moved to address communications failures, among other new measures.

But on Aug 27, Marine One again had difficulty connecting with the control tower, and had to rely on the pilots of other government helicopters to act as intermediaries.

The controller and the pilots of Marine One were able to make contact after a few minutes, before the helicopter took off.

The emergency landing of Mullin’s plane also highlights longstanding concerns about the state of the Coast Guard’s fleet of aircraft.

In 2025, Mullin’s predecessor Kristi Noem prompted controversy when the department spent US$172 million (S$218.5 million) to purchase two private Gulfstream jets, to replace an ageing model that the secretary had been using for travel.

But the scrutiny of the purchase highlighted a broader issue with ageing aircraft in the Coast Guard’s fleet.

In a May 2025 letter to Noem questioning the purchase, top Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee pointed out that there was “sorely needed modernisation of the USCG’s ageing aircraft fleet used by service members for search and rescue and other critical missions”.

They added that “many USCG aircraft entered service in the 1980s and 1990s”. NYTIMES