Dozens of Jetstar flights grounded after Airbus announces plane recalls

A global aeroplane recall has seen Jetstar cancel dozens of flights, leaving thousands of passengers stranded.

Queues at airport terminals, including in Sydney and Melbourne, snaked hundreds of metres this morning as the airline was hit by a flight-control software issue related to plane manufacturer Airbus.

Airbus says a significant number of its best-selling A320 planes are being pulled in a move that industry sources say would disrupt half the global fleet.

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Jetstar told 9News it was forced to cancel 90 flights today, with several others delayed.

This afternoon, Jetstar said 20 of its 34 affected aircraft were ready to return to service.

"We're expecting the remaining to be ready overnight, allowing flights to resume as planned on Sunday," a spokesperson said.

"However, there may be some flow on delays or cancellations on Sunday as the network fully recovers. We will contact customers by SMS and email if there are any further disruptions."

The software fix takes about three hours per plane.

Departure screens at Sydney show multiple cancellations this morning.

However, flights leaving by the afternoon were generally showing up as on time at both Sydney and Melbourne.

Air New Zealand services were also affected.

Airbus says it's related to a "solar radiation" issue on a plane.

"Analysis of a recent event involving an A320 Family aircraft has revealed that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls," Airbus said in a statement.

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"Airbus has put out a directive that the aircraft, the A320 aircraft, of which there are more than 10,000 around the world, have to have a software update to correct for an error in data when there's intense solar radiation," pilot and aviation expert Richard de Crespigny said.

"So it's not suggesting that there's something wrong with the actual flight controls themselves."

"The problem is that you have to update all the aircraft in your fleet."

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"If you've only got a couple of engineers that have turned up for work, you'd need them to pull in many more."

"You've got to wait for the aircraft to land."

"Maybe the aircraft has been in a hangar overnight. It's just a problem of scheduling all the aircraft to be updated quickly, that's all."

It's the second day of chaos at Melbourne Airport after a fire caused the evacuation of the Qantas terminal.

Plane loads of passengers were stuck on the tarmac for almost two hours last night, after emergency crews put out a blaze in a storage room in Terminal 1.

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