27-05-2025
Plane awkward: How Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron joined the club
French President Emmanuel Macron's recent awkwardness with his wife Brigitte, caught on film as the couple prepared to disembark on arrival for an official tour of Vietnam, is no entirely new phenomenon.
Embarkation as well as disembarkation have both seen world leaders embroiled in moments that have been captured on film for posterity, sparking irony and satire, and capturing their embarrassment for posterity. Here are some of the most noted examples:
US President Gerald Ford slipped and fell in June 1975 while descending the steps of Air Force One in Salzburg, Austria. The incident was captured on camera and suddenly became the subject of satire.
Ford blamed the slip on an old knee injury, but this episode gave him the reputation of a bumbler, which was used by top comedian Chevy Chase forhis sketches.
The incident became an issue for Ford's re-election campaign the following year, contributing to a perception of clumsiness during his presidency. Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter.
Another US President to find the stairs tricky was Joe Biden, who experienced multiple stumbles while boarding Air Force One.
In March 2021, he tripped three times ascending the stairs at Joint Base Andrews, which the White House attributed to windy conditions. Biden appeared to take a moment to dust off his knee before making his way onto the aircraft.
A similar incident occurred in 2023, sparking doubts about his physical condition.
Despite avoiding major incidents, Donald Trump has sometimes struggled in climbing and descending stairs as well.
In October 2018, he was seen discarding an umbrella at the top of the Air Force One stairs, letting it roll away as he boarded the plane.
On another occasion, he was spotted with a piece of toilet paper stuck to the sole of his shoe, as he boarded an Air Force One plane heading to Minnesota.
In June 2020, he was observed cautiously descending a ramp at West Point, sparking discussions about his health. He later explained that the ramp was "very long and steep" and lacked a handrail .
In November 2022, the then Indonesian First Lady Iriana stumbled while descending the stairs of the presidential aircraft, on her husband Joko Widodo's arm.
The presidential couple landed at the I Gusti Ngurah Rai Airport in Bali, to join the G20 summit.
Iriana was immediately assisted by the presidential security team and, unharmed, was able to go on with her scheduled engagements.
Sometimes just finding the stairs can prove too much of a challenge. This was the case of Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who landed in Ireland in 1994 for an official visit but did not emerge from his aeroplane.
Then Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds and his ministers were left bemused on the red carpet at Shannon Airport, waiting in vain for the Russian premier.
Various excuses were offered for his absence: he was "indisposed", resting after a tiring flight, his bodyguards too frightened to wake him. Most opinion coalesced around the suggestion that he was simply too drunk to make it to the stairs, however.
Yeltsin wrote to Reynolds apologising for the "unfortunate mishap" that prevented their meeting and extending an invitation to Reynolds to visit Russia the following year.
Belgian Customs will start using military radar systems to monitor private aircraft more closely in a bid to combat smuggling, officials have said.
The move comes as authorities acknowledge that smugglers are taking advantage of limited oversight at small airports and heliports across the country.
Private planes are often used to transport drugs, weapons, cash and illicit goods with little to no scrutiny.
Belgium has around 150 airfields and heliports, many of which allow private aircraft to land and depart without formal customs checks.
Officials say this lack of surveillance has made them a magnet for trafficking operations.
"There are thousands and thousands of flights in Belgium. Customs concentrated all its efforts and controls on the six most important airports, but the other 150 were really a blind spot for us," said Kristian Vanderwaeren, the General Administrator of Belgian Customs.
Private aircraft offer further advantages to criminals, including flexible routes, rapid turnaround times on the ground and the ability to switch off transponders – devices that allow aircraft to be tracked – making them invisible to standard monitoring systems.
To improve monitoring, a customs officer will now be seconded to Belgium's national airspace security centre.
From there, they will use radar data provided by the Ministry of Defence to identify and flag suspicious flights – even those with disabled transponders.
"This will then enable us to send a team, a brigade, to an airport where, until now, we haven't carried out any checks," explained Vanderwaeren.
Authorities recorded only about 30 smuggling-related offences involving private aircraft in Belgium last year. But with stepped-up surveillance, officials expect detections to rise.
