A plane carrying Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made an emergency landing in the UK after he visited Brussels on Wednesday but nobody was harmed, officials say. "On the way back to the United States from NATO's Defense Ministers meeting, Secretary of War Hegseth's plane made an unscheduled landing in the United Kingdom due to a crack in the aircraft windshield," Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a post on X. "The plane landed based on standard procedures and everyone onboard, including Secretary Hegseth, is safe."
The BBC reports that the aircraft began losing altitude off the southwest coast of Ireland before it turned back to land at a Royal Air Force base in England. As it turned back, it began issuing a 7700 "squawk code," the general code for an emergency. Stars and Stripes reports that Hegseth was traveling in an Air Force C-32, a version of the Boeing 757-200 that has an identical body but a specially configured interior.
In a post on X, Hegseth said: "All good. Thank God. Continue mission!" In his remarks to NATO ministers on Wednesday, Hegseth urged them to step up support for Ukraine. "Our expectation today is that more countries donate even more, that they purchase even more, to provide for Ukraine, to bring that conflict to a peaceful conclusion," he said, per Stars and Stripes. The AP reports that Hegseth was not accompanied by any members of the Pentagon press corps. Many of them were busy emptying out their desks after rejecting Hegseth's new rules for the press.
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