The canceled visit is just the latest in a string of official trips to be affected by problems with government planes.
On that note: The problematic A340 planes in question were bought used by the conservative Merkel government from Lufthansa in 2009. The machines were previously used as VIP machines for Lufthansa.
Well, turns out that buying ten year old planes leads to problems with reliability after another ten years.
Luckily, three new A350-900 planes were procured in 2020, brand new and produced especially for government use, including certain modifications for things like “don’t get shot down”. Those things should be somewhat reliable for the next two deacdes again.
A350-900
ACJ350-900 (or ACJ350 XWB)
In 2020 only the first one was delivered. In March, 2023, the third one.
And now they are still decorating the new machines or why are they still not used?
From what I read the chancellor always has two planes on standby and those are the new ones.
is ten years old really that long of a service life for a plane? i looked it up and the average lifespan of a service plane is 20-30 years
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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