A van on the runway and three other close calls: what the ATSB is investigating at Townsville

In short: The ATSB is investigating four serious incidents at or near Townsville Airport since early September. In the latest, on 7 October, a Jetstar A320 passed about 50 feet above a van on the runway. Nobody was hurt, all four flights ended safely, and no findings have been published yet.

A Jetstar plane on approach to Townsville passed about 50 feet above a van that had entered the runway on 7 October, and it is now one of four serious incidents in or near the city that air safety investigators are looking into.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has classed the 7 October event as a serious incident and opened a short investigation into the runway incursion and near collision. Nobody was hurt.

What happened at Townsville Airport on 7 October

According to the ATSB, the aircraft was a Jetstar Airbus A320 operating flight JQ908 from Brisbane. As the crew approached runway 01 at about 2.20pm, they saw a white van entering the runway at the threshold. The van stopped at the outer edge of the runway while the aircraft passed at about 50 feet (roughly 15 metres) above ground level. The plane then landed, and the van went on across the runway.

The ATSB lists the occurrence under several categories, including runway incursion, near collision and "security related". It expects to finish its report in the first quarter of 2027.

Jetstar told the ABC that the flight landed normally and that it was working with the ATSB. Townsville Airport is a joint civil and military airport, and air traffic control there is provided by the Royal Australian Air Force. Defence told the ABC it was working closely with the ATSB after "a vehicle entered a restricted airside area", and would make no further comment while the matter is under investigation.

Three other open investigations

The van incident is the latest of four Townsville-area investigations the ATSB has opened since early September. All are still in progress, and none has published findings.

• 5 September: at the start of take-off, the crew of Jetstar flight JQ905, an A320 bound for Brisbane, found a performance calculation error and rejected the take-off.

• 23 September: QantasLink flight QLK1550, an Airbus A220 from Brisbane, made two missed approaches in low cloud, then declared a MAYDAY for minimum fuel on its third approach. Visibility had improved by then and the aircraft landed.

• 1 October: about 18 kilometres west of the airport, a Skytrans Dash 8 and a light training aircraft came within about 0.3 nautical miles (around 550 metres) of each other at the same altitude. The Dash 8 crew descended in response to a collision-avoidance alert.

Is there a pattern?

It is too early to say. The ATSB investigates individual occurrences, and it has not said the four events are linked. Its standard approach is to interview the people involved, review recorded data and publish a final report. If it finds a critical safety issue along the way, it says it will notify the relevant parties immediately.

Sidney Dekker, from Griffith University's Safety Science Innovation Lab, told the ABC there was only cause for concern if the incidents shared a common cause, and that there was no basis to speculate before the investigations finish. He described the van incident as rare and said the pilots seeing the van and acting on it showed "the system worked".

What travellers can take from this

For passengers, the practical message is limited. All four flights ended safely, and investigations like these are part of how aviation finds and fixes risks before they cause harm. Each ATSB page linked above will be updated as the investigations progress, and the final reports will set out what happened and why.

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Cover photo: Queensland Airports Limited via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped to fit.

This story was researched and drafted with the help of an AI assistant from the ATSB investigation pages and ABC report linked above, then checked and edited by AusLume Media before publication.