Pope Leo XIV’s return flight to Rome was grounded Friday after a technical failure aboard his Iberia charter at Tenerife Norte-Los Rodeos International Airport in the Canary Islands.
The Iberia pilot reported that the engine had failed to start after Leo had boarded, and initial efforts to fix the problem proved unsuccessful.
King Felipe VI of Spain stepped in to offer Leo his private Falcon jet, personally escorting the pontiff to the aircraft on the tarmac at Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
Leo and members of his delegation boarded the king’s plane and took off, more than three hours after he was originally scheduled to depart.
Iberia confirmed it was sending a separate aircraft from Madrid to collect the Vatican officials and journalists who were not aboard the king’s Falcon.
The incident marked an unusual conclusion to an otherwise successful weeklong papal visit that included stops in Madrid, Barcelona and the Canary Islands.
During the trip, Leo pressed his message on migration and inaugurated the new tower of the iconic Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona.
Veteran Vatican reporters recalled that the last comparable disruption to a papal flight occurred during the pontificate of St. John Paul II, with a handful of incidents across his long tenure.
During a 1986 return trip from India, John Paul’s plane was forced to land in Naples due to a snowstorm over Rome, with the pope and passengers taking a special train back to the capital.
In 1988, bad weather forced John Paul’s plane to land in South Africa while en route to Lesotho, a country he had deliberately excluded from his African itinerary at the time because of apartheid.
It marked the first time in decades that a papal flight had experienced a problem so serious it required the pope to change planes entirely.
Under typical arrangements, Italian national carrier ITA Airways brings the pope to his destination, and the host country’s national carrier returns him to Rome, with journalists seated in coach at the rear of the charter.
Iberia had prominently featured video earlier in the trip of Leo seated in the cockpit, smiling broadly as the plane carried him between Spanish cities, with military aircraft providing an airborne escort both from Madrid to Barcelona and from Barcelona to the Canary Islands.
The Spanish archipelago sits geographically closer to the African continent than to the Iberian Peninsula, a fact that framed Leo’s broader migration message throughout the visit.
