Germany's air force on Friday was investigating a serious technical mishap on Chancellor Angela Merkel's plane that forced an emergency landing and delayed her arrival at the G20 summit by more than 12 hours.
The latest embarrassing glitch for the German military forced Merkel to instead take a commercial flight to Buenos Aires with a vastly reduced delegation and miss scheduled talks with several world leaders.
It was not yet clear whether Merkel could hold her planned talks at a later stage with US President Donald Trump, Russia's Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping of China.
Shortly after takeoff from Berlin on Thursday, Merkel's Airbus A340-300 was forced to turn back over Dutch airspace, and make an emergency landing in Cologne.
The plane had suffered a complete breakdown of the on-board communication system, a problem described as extremely rare, which forced the pilot to communicate via a satellite phone instead. “It was a serious malfunction,” Merkel told reporters travelling with her aboard the “Konrad Adenauer”, a former Lufthansa airlines jet named after post-war Germany's first chancellor.
