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A QantasLink flight has been forced to return to Adelaide after smoke was detected on board.
The early-morning flight QF1972 to Canberra, on board wet-leased Alliance E190 VH-UZI, made a PAN call after the pilots detected smoke in the flight deck and turned back to Adelaide. The flight, which had several Liberal politicians on board, landed safely at around 6:20am.
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“One of our Adelaide to Canberra flights returned to Adelaide shortly after take-off this morning, after reporting a technical issue,” a Qantas spokesperson said.
“The aircraft landed safely and our engineers will be checking the aircraft today. All customers on board have since been put onto alternative flights.
“Our pilots are highly trained to handle situations like this and the aircraft landed safely after the appropriate procedures were conducted.”
Speaking to Adelaide’s radio FiveAA, South Australian Liberal Senator Leah Blyth, who was on board along with fellow senator Andrew McLachlan and MP Tony Pasin, said she was “happy to be safe on the ground” after also seeing the smoke in the cabin.
The politicians were en route to a Liberal Party meeting on net zero in Canberra.
“It was unusual, but obviously, we fly a lot as politicians. I’ve never had a cabin fill with smoke quite like that before,” she said.
“Hats off to the Qantas staff who were cool, calm and collected and got us back on the ground safely. It smelt electrical rather than fuel or anything like that.”
Alliance operates a fleet of 30 E190s for QantasLink, with a total of 79 more broadly in revenue service. Its wet leasing revenue in 2024-25 was up 13.8 per cent over last year; however, the carrier this month flagged lower earnings than previously anticipated due to higher costs.
“Increased purchase price of aircraft and engines operating shorter sectors, coupled with higher than budgeted capitalised base maintenance costs, have resulted in an increase of FY26 depreciation charges of $15 million (on an annualised basis),” the airline told the ASX.
“Repairs and maintenance, compliance and logistics costs have exceeded budget expectations by $1 million per month, resulting in an annualised cost increase of $12 million, reflecting price inflation across our supply chain and inefficiencies.
“Implementation of the AVIAN Inventory Management agreement commenced earlier than expected. While this has contributed to improving on-time performance, an additional cost of $3.5 million was incurred in the first quarter.”
Alliance has stressed that it is still profitable and said it was undertaking a full review of the current basis of depreciation being expensed, a cost-reduction program targeting purchasing and logistics processes, the sale of “non-core assets” and the evaluation of its property portfolio.
