A German finance ministry spokesman confirmed the report, saying that the ministry would approve the defence ministry's request for funding.

Germany's government fleet, transporting Angela Merkel and ministers around the world, has been grappling with a series of technical incidents and outages over the last months. It decided to order three new Airbus A350-900 aircraft in April.

(Reporting by Tassilo Hummel; Editing by Michael Nienaber and Jane Merriman)

Stocks treated in this article : Airbus SE, Bombardier, Inc.