Bird-strike grounds jet as passengers tweet

Passengers flying from Wellington to Sydney were stranded in Christchurch yesterday after a Qantas flight suffered a bird strike.

Passenger Karl Baron on QF48, a Boeing 737-400 with about 130 people on board, said one engine ''started vibrating heavily'' after it ''hit a bird or something''.

Following an impromptu landing at Christchurch, the pilot confirmed a bird strike. Qantas said its engineers were examining the plane and alternative arrangements would be made for passengers.

The incident was just one in a series of events creating a wretched day for Australian air travellers on Sunday.

Passengers had to endure a nationwide breakdown of Qantas' check-in system, followed by a breakdown in Melbourne and Sydney of the automated baggage system.

Brisbane airport was also lashed by violent storms that threatened to ground planes.

The check-in system failure occurred across all Qantas terminals yesterday morning, which the airline blamed on a breakdown of the global check-in system, Amadeus.

It could not have come at a worse time, as holidaymakers prepared to fly home after the Christmas-New Year's break.

Queues of disgruntled passengers snaked through the Qantas domestic terminals, many of whom vented their anger via social-networking site Twitter.

''Yep. Qantas Melbourne major queues. It's crazy ... expect HUGE delays,'' one passenger wrote.

Another wrote: ''Qantas' system down for 2 hours in Sydney ... chaos and irritation. Just want to go home guys. Qantas fail.''

A Qantas spokesman said the outage was intermittent, occurring between 8.25am and 9.30am. It had knock-on effects into the afternoon.

''As a result of manual processes obviously taking a little longer ... delays [are expected] up to an hour on the first wave of domestic services affected,'' the spokesman said.

But Qantas had barely begun to recover when its automated baggage system failed a few hours later.

''It's been an hour since I landed and still my bags haven't come out on the carousel,'' one angered passenger blogged.

The Qantas spokesman said the sheer number of bags caused a system overload.

''We've had to go to manual operations as far as generating manual baggage tags,'' the Qantas spokesman said. ''Some passengers are travelling with their bags following on the next flight.''

- © Fairfax NZ News