Germany is selling its Airbus A340 'Merkel One' aircraft after a series of mechanical failures forced it out of service

• Germany's Air Force is selling its former VIP Airbus A340-300 plane in mid-Janaury 2024.
• The move comes after the jet experienced several mechanical failures with German officials onboard.

After a more than 10-year run flying government officials around the world, Germany is selling off its last VIP Airbus A340-300.

Dubbed "Merkel One," the quad-jet is the country's version of the US Air Force One and has been flying for Germany since 2011 after serving as a passenger aircraft for Lufthansa.

The state-owned trust company Vebeg will auction off the jet starting in mid-January 2024, at which time it "will be happy to accept expressions of interest," Vebeg said on its website.

It is uncertain who will bid for the aging plane, but given its history of mechanical problems, the buyer list will likely be short, Simple Flying noted.

The A340, registered 16+01 and built in 1999, is the second ex-VIP jet that Germany has put up for sale.

The first, registered 16+02 and built one year later in 2000, was sold in September to an unknown buyer in the US, Dutch aviation news outlet Scramble reported.

According to Planespotters and the Federal Aviation Administration, 16+02 is currently registered with the tail number N577TA to a company called Sky West Aviation Inc Trustee.

Both of Germany's old A340 planes left the Air Force fleet early after serious maintenance issues arose during flights with German officials onboard. And 16+01, in particular, had its fair share.

In June 2018, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was temporarily held up on his way to Belarus when 16+01 experienced a hydraulic failure and couldn't take off, the German media outlet Deutsche Welle reported.

A few months later in November 2018, 16+01 delayed then-Chancellor Angela Merkel's trip to the G20 summit in Argentina due to a mid-air electrical fault on board the A340, the BBC reported. Merkel was forced to take a commercial Iberia Airlines flight instead.

The quad-engine jet then had a tire blow during landing in New York in April 2019, per the DW.

But the latest event proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

In August 2023, the same A340 plane had another issue over Abu Dhabi when "the wing flaps could not be retracted correctly," and the jet had to return to the airport, according to an X (formerly Twitter) post by the German Air Force.

The plane eventually aborted its mission after a second failed attempt, leaving German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock stuck in Abu Dhabi.

"We tried everything: unfortunately it is not logistically possible to continue my Indo-Pacific trip without the broken plane," Baerbock posted on X. She was supposed to fly to Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji.

The August failure prompted Germany's Air Force to retire the A340 fleet early, saying on X that it initially planned to retire 16+01 at the end of September 2023 and 16+02 at the end of 2024.

Both planes were withdrawn from use by mid-August, according to Planespotters.

Although the A340s are gone, Germany has a shiny new fleet of Airbus A350s that it began acquiring in 2020 and currently uses to fly its high-ranking officials.

The purchase was prompted after Merkel's 2018 fiasco.