A plane carrying former US president Donald Trump was reportedly forced to make an emergency landing on Saturday night after suffering engine failure over the Gulf of Mexico.
The Dassault Falcon 900 had flown about 75 miles from a New Orleans airport before turning back to the city, an unnamed source told the Reuters news agency.
The plane had been taking Trump back to his luxury Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, from a New Orleans hotel where he addressed Republican party donors at a private event.
Other passengers included Secret Service agents, support staff and some advisers to Trump. The aircraft turned around just before 11pm.
The Politico website, which first reported the incident, cited a source as saying that audio of communications between the pilot and the air traffic control tower revealed that the landing was described as “emergency in nature”.
The plane belonged to a donor who loaned it to the former president for the evening, and Trump advisers secured another donor’s plane to take him back to Florida. He landed in Palm Beach at around 3am on Sunday.
At the event in New Orleans, Trump delivered a discursive and bizarre 84-minute speech, musing that US should put the Chinese flag on F-22 jets and “bomb the shit out of Russia” as payback for the invasion of Ukraine.
“And then we say, ‘China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it,’ and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch,” he told a laughing audience.
Trump also teased a presidential run in 2024, remarking: “We are looking at it very, very strongly. We have to do it. We have to do it.”
He is likely to be airborne again on Saturday when he holds a rally in Florence, South Carolina, along with Governor Henry McMaster and the congressional candidates Russell Fry and Katie Arrington.
