A smoking oven forced the captain of a Air Canada (AIDIF) flight on Thursday to dump fuel and return back to Sydney International Airport.

About half an hour into the flight of the Boeing Co. (BA) 777 plane, a crew member noticed smoke from an oven in the galley area, according to a spokesman for the airline. As a precautionary measure, the captain decided to turn back to Sydney but had to dump fuel to make a safe landing as the heavy plane was loaded for a 15-hour flight to Vancouver.

"The firemen came on and weren't concerned and the engineers came on and took away the offending oven," the spokeswoman said. The aircraft has since taken off again.

A spokesman for Australia's transport minister said "there was a bit of smoke in the cabin" and that the plane landed normally on its return to Sydney.

-By Ross Kelly, Dow Jones Newswires; 61-2-8272-4692; Ross.Kelly@dowjones.com

(Enda Curran and David Rogers in Sydney contributed to this report)

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