The Pope Leo XIV flight grounded in the Canary Islands this week proved that even pontiffs aren’t immune to travel headaches. When his charter home to Rome ran into trouble, an unlikely rescuer stepped in: Spain’s King Felipe VI, who offered up his own private jet.

The episode capped a weeklong visit to Spain in dramatic, if unexpected, fashion.

A Royal Rescue on the Tarmac

Leo’s Iberia charter, set to carry him back to Rome, was sidelined by a technical fault on Friday at the airport in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. With the pope stranded, Felipe stepped forward with a solution.

The king personally escorted Leo to his Falcon jet on the tarmac. The pope and members of his delegation boarded and took off—more than three hours after their originally scheduled departure.

What Went Wrong

The trouble began after Leo had already settled into the Iberia plane. According to the pilot, the engine simply failed to start.

Initial repair attempts came up short, ultimately forcing every passenger to disembark. With the pope whisked away on the royal jet, Iberia arranged to send a replacement aircraft from Madrid to collect the Vatican officials and journalists left behind. The remote location didn’t help matters—the Spanish archipelago sits closer to Africa than to the Iberian Peninsula.

Notably, it was the first time in decades that a papal flight had hit a snag serious enough to require the pope to switch planes entirely.

Echoes of Past Papal Travel Troubles

Veteran Vatican reporters, some of whom were aboard the grounded Iberia flight, recalled a handful of similar incidents from the era of St. John Paul II:

• In 1986, returning from India, his plane was diverted to Naples because of a snowstorm in Rome, sending passengers and pope onward by special train.
• In 1988, en route to Lesotho, bad weather forced a landing in South Africa—a country John Paul had deliberately left off his itinerary over apartheid. He was later driven into the kingdom.

Against that backdrop, Friday’s mechanical failure stood out as a rare disruption.

How Papal Flights Usually Work

Papal travel typically follows a well-established routine. Italy’s ITA Airways usually flies the pope to his destination, while the host country’s national carrier handles the journey home. For especially long trips, or those to places lacking the capacity, ITA sometimes manages the round trip.

These are charter flights with a clear pecking order: the pope, his Vatican delegation and security occupy the front of the plane, while the roughly 70 accompanying journalists are seated in coach.

A Trip Marked by Memorable Moments

The grounding was an unusual coda to what had otherwise been a triumphant tour through Madrid, Barcelona and the Canary Islands. During the visit, Leo pressed his message on migration and inaugurated the new tower of Barcelona’s famed Sagrada Familia basilica.

Iberia had clearly relished its role earlier in the journey. The airline proudly shared video of Leo seated in the cockpit, beaming as the plane carried him between cities. On both the Madrid-to-Barcelona and Barcelona-to-Canary Islands legs, Spanish military aircraft provided an airborne escort as a mark of respect, with one clip capturing Leo waving to an escorting pilot.

In the end, a mechanical failure that might have soured the trip instead produced a memorable image of cooperation—a king personally seeing a pope safely on his way home.