Donnie Wahlberg thanks God after scary plane incident
The New Kids on the Block singer said his flight to Toronto never got off the ground and that the pilots saved their lives.
On Sunday night, October 18, Donnie Wahlberg posted a video on Instagram to say that the plane he was traveling on ran off the runway at Harry Reid Airport in Las Vegas. Billboard reported the incident.
Wahlberg, a member of New Kids on the Block, didn't talk about luck. He thanked the pilots and God in the same message: "We were taking off, we didn't lift off, and we ran out of runway. These pilots saved our lives, and God covered us" (Sígueme translation).
In the caption that came with the recording, he said it was a few moments that felt like long minutes. He confirmed that he, his team and friends were on board, and that the plane ended up damaged although everyone got out unharmed. He closed by thanking the emergency crews who responded to the scene in Las Vegas.
«Thanking God is not the same as calling chance luck»
What we know about the aborted takeoff
Billboard reported that the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed the pilot aborted the takeoff as the plane was getting ready to fly to Toronto. The cause is still under investigation, so nobody can yet say what went wrong on the runway.
The airport had earlier posted on X that a general aviation aircraft went off a runway and hit the perimeter fence. In the video, Wahlberg showed the trucks and the dumpster that the plane avoided when it veered off. The official statement sounds like paperwork; what it felt like inside, by his account, was something else.
The trip came a day after the band wrapped up its residency at the Dolby Live at Park MGM on Saturday, October 17. The group released its latest album in 2024: Still Kids, which reached No. 56 on the Billboard 200. A closing party in Las Vegas and, the next day, a plane braking hard.
Gratitude with a name, not luck
"Thank God" gets said a thousand times a day, often with no one on the receiving end. Thanking God is not the same as calling chance luck. A lucky charm gets carried just in case; faith rests in Someone who governs what we can't control.
Wahlberg named God twice in public. It isn't right to deduce his whole faith from one video, and we don't need to: it's enough to read what he said. He put the outcome in the hands of God and of the pilots, not in the good fortune of the morning.
The Bible doesn't promise that no plane will ever go off a runway. James puts it plainly: "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that" (James 4:15, ESV).
That sounds uncomfortable because it leaves life in someone else's hands. It also comforts: if God governs, the scare was neither a fluke nor a punishment. And if one day the plane doesn't stop in time, faith doesn't break. The gospel doesn't promise safety; it announces Christ in the scare and in the grief.
What to do when the scare wears off
Name it. Thanks gains strength when it gets specific: thank you for letting me make it home. And tell someone this week, because shared relief lasts longer than the scare. Then check what you've been putting off; a hard stop on the runway has a bad habit of reordering priorities.
If a truck sped past you today, or a traffic light saved you by half a second, who did you thank? Write it down, say it out loud and tell someone. Gratitude with no one to receive it stays relief; directed to God, it becomes prayer.
