'Bigger bird' likely involved after flames seen coming from plane

Queenstown Airport's chief executive believes a large bird must have been involved in an incident which resulted in flames coming out of plane soon after take off.

Virgin Australia was working to get passengers back to Melbourne as soon as possible after the frightening take off from Queenstown last night.

Flames were seen coming out the back of a Boeing 737 that departed from Queenstown on Monday evening, forcing the plane to divert to Invercargill where it landed safely.

It's believed the plane carrying 67 passengers and six crew suffered a possible bird strike.

Glen Sowry told Morning Report bird strike couldn't be confirmed until the 737's engine was inspected by engineers.

There had been a couple of confirmed bird strikes involving smaller birds at the airport over the past month, which was pretty normal activity, he said.

"There's a tremendous amount of effort goes into managing the risk of bird strikes and to do that we put a lot of effort into everything as simple as making sure that grass at the airport is kept short, there's no standing water, so making it as unattractive a place for birds to be as we can."

A runway inspection just minutes before the Virgin Australia flight left detected no birds, he said.

Small birds typically didn't do too much damage, Sowry said.

"Normally it's the small birds that we see around Queenstown Airport.

"It's possible that this may have been a bigger bird that's come into contact with this aircraft...If you get a bigger bird that is ingested into an engine, which looks probable that this is what may have occured on this occasion, then depending on where abouts through the engine it goes it can do quite significant damage to critical parts of the engine."

Sowry said it was the pilots call to divert to Invercargill, though there was no reason they couldn't have land safely in Queenstown.

He expected many of the passengers would be returned to Queenstown to make their way to Australia.