U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was unable to fly out of Davos as scheduled on Wednesday due to a critical error in his plane, reports UNN citing Bloomberg.
Details
As the publication notes, after flying from Davos to Zurich by helicopter and landing on a modified Boeing Co. 737, Blinken and his team were informed that it was deemed unsafe to fly the plane. The oxygen leak detected earlier could not be repaired.
A smaller plane left Brussels to ferry the top U.S. diplomat home, while many of his aides and members of the press had to take commercial flights to Washington.
Bloomberg notes while malfunctions on airplanes are not uncommon, this failure came at a difficult time for Boeing. Regulators have suspended many 737 Max 9 planes since the Jan. 5 crash of an Alaska Airlines jet.
The airplane used by Blinken is an older variant of the Boeing 737 and is designated by the U.S. Air Force as the C40.
Last September, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was stranded in India after the G20 summit in New Delhi due to a mechanical failure of his airplane. Germany's fleet of aging government aircraft has also undergone a number of malfunctions during long flights, leading to the accelerated retirement of aircraft such as the Airbus A340 and the purchase of new-generation A350s.