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BERLIN: Germany’s foreign minister was waiting in Abu Dhabi on Monday after a technical problem on her government plane – the latest in a succession of such incidents – forced it to return to the airport rather than continue to Australia. Annalena Baerbock was due to arrive in Canberra on Monday night. But her German air force Airbus A340 had to return to Abu Dhabi after a refuelling stop because of “a mechanical problem with the landing flaps,” ministry spokesman Sebastian Fischer wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
It was the latest in a string of problems with Germany’s government planes, some of which are aging, that have affected various senior officials. In May, Baerbock had to extend a trip to the Persian Gulf region by a day because of a damaged tyre on an aircraft when she was in Qatar. The plane Baerbock was using for her flight to Australia was involved in a 2018 incident that resulted in then-Chancellor Angela Merkel and then-finance minister Olaf Scholz making a delayed departure to a G20 summit in Argentina on a commercial flight. In that case, an electrical distributor box failed, affecting the radio system and a fuel system and meaning that the aircraft couldn’t dump fuel.
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