An Air New Zealand flight travelling to Auckland from Taiwan, which was diverted to Guam on Friday due to an "unidentified odour", is back on New Zealand soil this morning.
Flight NZ78 touched down in Auckland at 6.55am this morning. It left Guam last night.
The flight had been forced to make an emergency stop in Guam early on Friday morning due to an odour in the cabin that couldn't be resolved in-flight. A passenger on the flight had told Stuff it was an "electrical kind of smell".
An image taken from onboard the plane showed firefighters inside the cabin after it landed in Guam.
In a statement to 1News, Air New Zealand's chief operational integrity and safety officer Captain David Morgan said engineers in Guam had completed a full service on the area of the plane where the odour was identified.
"The checks all came up clear and following a short verification flight operated by our crew, the aircraft was cleared to continue onto Auckland," he said.
"The safety of our customers and our people is our number one priority, so it was important to run through these engineering checks as a precaution."
Morgan said the airline had provided accommodation for "as many customers as possible" while they were in Guam.
"Those who booked their own accommodation will be able to claim compensation for associated costs.
"We'd like to thank impacted customers for their patience while we worked to get them to their destination with the added complexity of stopping at a port we do not usually operate at. We appreciate this was not an ideal scenario and thank them for their understanding while we worked to find a solution as quickly as possible."
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