Government fleet in dire straights
The fleet of largely outdated government planes used to ferry Czech government officials and the president from one foreign trip to another is clearly not up to the job. A Tupolev Tu-154 carrying the Czech Foreign Minister Cyril Svoboda on an 11-day tour of Latin American states was forced to make an emergency landing in Mauritania late Wednesday, following a hydraulics failure. This is the fifth time in recent months that planes carrying Czech government officials have been forced to make emergency landings.
Reports about Czech government officials stranded in unexpected destinations are becoming something of a joke in the Czech Republic. Foreign Minister Cyril Svoboda's post has become particularly hazard prone - in addition to the incident on this trip, he had problems on a trip to Montenegro recently, when the Soviet made plane he was travelling on was grounded at Podgorica Airport due to a safety indicator defect.
A Canadian made Challenger, considered the most reliable plane of the government's fleet, was carrying President Klaus to Rome to attend Pope John Paul's funeral earlier this year and had to make a stop over in Germany because its front window cracked.
In 2004 the very same thing happened to another government plane carrying the foreign minister to Katar. Defence Minister Karel Kuhnl has also had his share of travel glitches - on a trip to Israeli in March of this year his Tu-154 plane was forced to turn back to Prague because of a technical defect. In mid-June he spent an unscheduled night in the Afghan town of Fajzabad. In short, not a happy state of affairs.
"The foreign minister thinks it is high time to renew the government's fleet. He says that even Vietnamese officials are now using Boings while Czech government officials still fly in the outdated Tupolev planes. Even what we saw here at the airport shows that the Mauritanian government has better planes than ours."
So how many more incidents will it take before the government gets a new fleet of reliable planes? In April the Cabinet approved a plan to gradually renew the fleet at a cost of some four billion crowns. It plans to buy two big transport planes, two smaller ones and two helicopters. The new fleet should be in service by 2007. In the meantime Czech government officials will need to keep their fingers crossed and hope that the outdated Soviet fleet will not cause any greater problems than a few hours of waiting at unscheduled destinations.
