Chile's Presidential Boeing 767 Set for Asia Tour Including APEC in Shenzhen as Auditors Probe October Maintenance Contract

Chile's presidential Boeing 767-300ER (FACh 985, c/n 26205/474) is scheduled to leave Santiago at 10:30 PM on Friday for Hanoi, Vietnam, the first leg of President José Antonio Kast's Asia tour, which also includes China and Japan. After Hanoi, Kast is due to fly to Shenzhen on November 17 to attend the 33rd APEC Economic Leaders' Summit on November 18 and 19, then continue to Tokyo for an official visit. He is due to leave Japan on November 21 and reach Santiago in the early hours of November 22.

The aircraft is the subject of a formal inquiry by Chile's Contraloría General de la República, led by Contralora Dorothy Pérez, which opened its review after receiving an anonymous complaint on October 10. Investigators have begun collecting contract records and have sent formal information requests to the Chilean Air Force (FACh). According to Bío Bío Investiga, FACh canceled an open international tender for the jet's maintenance and awarded the work by direct negotiation to the state-owned firm ENAER. ENAER passed the work to RAM, a Miami-based aerospace company.

On November 2 the aircraft drew emergency vehicles and firefighters after landing at the Torrejón de Ardoz military air base near Madrid, with brake overheating cited as the reason, and access was briefly restricted as a precaution. The presidency said the jet did not land with brake problems and experienced no failure, describing brake temperature variation as normal and the ventilation procedure as routine protocol. No causal link between the incident and the October maintenance work has been established.

The 767 first flew in 1993 and entered service with Aeroflot in 1994, later flying for TWA and EuroAtlantic Airways before FACh acquired it in 2008. In April 2009 an engine oil leak forced a diversion to the Canary Islands during a flight to Russia, and the jet stayed grounded there for more than two weeks.

Its previous regular maintenance, in 2024, was done at Delta Air Lines' TechOps facility in Atlanta. In October 2023, when the 767 was out for maintenance, then-President Gabriel Boric travelled to China on a Boeing 737-500 that needed six fuel stops outbound and eight on the return.

The APEC 2026 summit is hosted by China under the theme "Building an Asia-Pacific Community to Prosper Together"; APEC says Shenzhen will host the APEC Economic Leaders' Week in November 2026.

Government and head-of-state transport aircraft sit in an unusual corner of the maintenance market: work is often steered to state-owned entities, and those entities may subcontract to foreign shops. When a tender is canceled and the job is negotiated directly, the audit trail becomes the main safeguard, which is why a review of contract records is the natural first step for an oversight body.

The 2023 episode shows the operational cost of a single-airframe VIP fleet. With the 767 unavailable, a much smaller 737-500 had to fly the president to China, with six fuel stops outbound and eight on the return. A leader's travel schedule therefore depends directly on how quickly and how cleanly one aircraft returns from maintenance.

The Madrid landing and the audit are separate threads, and the presidency's account and the unconfirmed brake-overheating explanation sit side by side. What would settle the audit question is the Contraloría's analysis of the FACh–ENAER–RAM contract chain once FACh answers its information requests.