The 23-year-old Airbus A340 aircraft, named the “Konrad Adenauer” after the first chancellor of West Germany, landed in Abu Dhabi to refuel on Monday but returned shortly after takeoff because of a malfunction with the wing flaps.
Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance minister, now chancellor, Olaf Scholz, were traveling on the Adenauer to the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires in 2018 when they had to make an emergency landing at Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany.
Scholz was stranded in Indonesia after rodents gnawed through electric cables of the Adenauer, and a burst tire on arrival in New York delayed then-Foreign Minister Heiko Maas’s attending a U.N. Security Council meeting in 2019.
The aviation industry consultant Heinrich Grossbongardt said some of the reported problems with government aircraft in recent years would have been tolerated on commercial flights.
“Absences or late arrivals damage the national interest and the reputation of the Federal Republic of Germany,” the Defense Ministry said at the time to justify the purchase.
During the planned trip to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, Baerbock had, among her aims, intended to discuss economic security and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The 23-year-old Airbus A340 aircraft, named the “Konrad Adenauer” after the first chancellor of West Germany, landed in Abu Dhabi to refuel on Monday but returned shortly after takeoff because of a malfunction with the wing flaps.
Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance minister, now chancellor, Olaf Scholz, were traveling on the Adenauer to the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires in 2018 when they had to make an emergency landing at Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany.
Scholz was stranded in Indonesia after rodents gnawed through electric cables of the Adenauer, and a burst tire on arrival in New York delayed then-Foreign Minister Heiko Maas’s attending a U.N. Security Council meeting in 2019.
The aviation industry consultant Heinrich Grossbongardt said some of the reported problems with government aircraft in recent years would have been tolerated on commercial flights.
“Absences or late arrivals damage the national interest and the reputation of the Federal Republic of Germany,” the Defense Ministry said at the time to justify the purchase.
During the planned trip to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, Baerbock had, among her aims, intended to discuss economic security and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
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