G20: Canada PM Justin Trudeau leaves India after 36-hour delay over plane snag

Trudeau, who arrived in India on September 8 for the G20 Summit, was scheduled to leave New Delhi two days later.

This is not the first time that the 34-year-old aircraft, which is nicknamed ‘Flying Taj Mahal’, suffered a mechanical defect in its history of transporting Trudeau across the globe.

The CC 150 Polaris aircraft, an Airbus 310-300, was christened the ‘Flying Taj Mahal’ by the then opposition leader of Canada Jean Chrétien in the early 1990s.

Chrétien named it so after a lavish upgrade of the aircraft’s interiors, which was done by the then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Chrétien subsequently became the PM himself and he also used the aircraft on official trips but chose to tone down the interiors.

Before donning the VIP role, the ‘Flying Taj Mahal’ was part of a batch of five aircraft, which was inducted into commercial service for an airline company in 1987-88. It started having maintenance issues only recently and incidentally all of them have occurred during the prime ministership of Trudeau, media reports said.

In 2016, the aircraft developed a snag in the flaps which forced Trudeau to return to Ottawa, just 30 minutes after take off. At the time, he was headed to Brussels to sign a free trade deal with the European Union.

Two years later, Trudeau was on his way to India when the aircraft developed a snag in Rome during a refuelling stop.