In This Story
The latest Boeing plane running into turbulence? It belongs to Donald Trump. The former U.S. president’s private Boeing 757 ran into another plane on the runway at West Palm Beach International Airport on Sunday, according to WFLA, the NBC affiliate in Tampa, Florida. Nobody was injured in the accident.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is investigating the incident, told the outlet that a “privately-owned” Boeing 757 had indeed clipped a small private jet at that airport, operated by the VistaJet charter service.
WFLA was able to identify the 757 as Trump’s because its registration number matched the one that appears in photos of the plane; the plane also belongs to an aircraft operated by “DJT Operations I LLC.” It is unclear if Trump was onboard.
Trump’s plane, which he bought from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2011, is a key part of his public brand as a business man. When he traveled for rallies during the 2016 presidential elections, he would often disembark from it directly into hangars, where crowds of his supporters would be there to watch him speak. During the 2020 election, while he was in office, he transitioned to using Air Force One.
After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, CNN reported that the 757 sat mothballed for nearly two years before he began using it again ahead of his current run for the 2024 contest. On Saturday, the day before the collision, Trump flew on it from LaGuardia Airport in New York City (where he is fighting criminal fraud charges related to so-called alleged “hush money” payments made to the actor Stormy Daniels) to Wildwood, New Jersey, in the southern part of the state. The New York Post reports that his staff have taken to calling it “Trump Force One.”