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Germany's foreign minister reaches Australia — finally

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  • May 3, 2024 at 4:18 am #15067

    Beauty Beast
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    Germany’s foreign minister reaches Australia — finally

    A plane carrying German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock landed in the southern Australian city of Adelaide on Thursday for a trip that had to be abandoned last August.

    Baerbock made the journey on one of Berlin’s new VIP planes named Konrad Adenauer — the predecessor of which was dogged with frequent breakdowns.

    Why was the previous trip postponed?
    The aircraft was being closely watched after last year’s trip to Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji had to be abandoned because of repeated mechanical malfunctions.

    Technical issues with German government planes had begun to make the Berlin fleet an object of ridicule.

    The technical problems on Baerbock’s last Australia trip were with an older government aircraft — an Airbus A340 also named after Germany’s first post-war chancellor, Konrad Adenauer — which has since been taken out of service.

    Baerbock only made it as far as Abu Dhabi that time around.

    The aircraft was used by former Chancellor Angela Merkel and her successor Olaf Scholz, and suffered repeated problems.

    Merkel missed the start of a G20 summit in Buenos Aires when the jet experienced a “serious malfunction” in the air and had to turn back to land in Cologne. She finally arrived in the Argentine capital aboard a commercial flight.

    A week before that, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was delayed during a trip to several African countries when the government’s “Theodor Heuss” jet — also an Airbus A340 — experienced problems.

    The previous Konrad Adenauer also suffered breakdowns in New York and Beijing.

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