NBC News campaign embed Vaughn Hillyard has been flying aboard Mike Pence‘s campaign plane for three months now–and he was onboard Thursday night when the plane skidded off a rainy runway at La Guardia Airport in New York.
“We come through the clouds, go through the rain, you hit, we bounce about two or three seconds and that’s when the swerve takes place,” Hillyard told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, noting that at first, the eight campaign embeds onboard thought this was just another bumpy landing aboard the jet the campaign has dubbed “Trump Force Two.”
“Rough landings are a usual thing. Earlier we landed at Fort Dodge, Iowa, and we bounced back up into the air … so we brace for this,” he said. “So we’ve joked about ‘what time are we going to go off the tarmac?'”
Neither Pence nor any members of the crew, campaign staff, Secret Service, nor media were injured. Pence made the morning show rounds Friday, describing the incident as “ten seconds of uncertainty,” and thanking the emergency responders at La Guardia for immediately caring for everyone on the aircraft.
Our campaign embed @VaughnHillyard describes what happened during #GOP VP nom #MikePence’s plane landing in #NYC: https://t.co/CPMNOrRhUS
— The Last Word (@TheLastWord) October 28, 2016