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A First Air plane carrying 31 passengers and five crew members landed safely at Ottawa International Airport on Friday after circling the city for more than an hour and a half, burning off fuel to lighten the load.

The Boeing 737 plane took off from Ottawa for Iqaluit around 9 a.m. ET. About an hour and a half into the flight, passengers were informed the plane would be returning to Ottawa.

"They had an indication that the flap wasn't operating properly," First Air spokesman Chris Ferris told Â鶹ӰÊÓnet on Friday. "I'm not sure if it was actually even malfunctioning but they had an indication that it was."

The precautionary landing was ordered when the flight crew alerted air traffic controllers about the problem.

"The aircraft we were flying could not dump fuel and to meet maximum landing weight restrictions it had to circle for just over an hour to burn off the fuel," said Ferris.

CTV aviation expert Mark Miller said classifying the situation as an "emergency landing" is somewhat of a misrepresentation.

"This was a precautionary landing, pilots train for this in simulator, it's something they train for often," said Miller. "The concept of a precautionary landing is just a routine part of your day -- it's clear that there was nothing major here."

Ferris said the plane landed without incident and the passengers were generally calm -- some even slept through the incident.

The passengers on the plane will stay overnight in Ottawa and fly out Saturday morning.

First Air, which is owned by the Inuit people of Northern Quebec, services 25 northern communities with connections to Ottawa, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Montreal.

Transport Canada tracks every incident reported by airlines and it has been a busy year for First Air.

In the last 12 months, First Air filed 127 incident reports like today's. A much larger airline, Air Canada, had 96 reports in comparison. Over the same time period, WestJet had 50.

In a similar incident in the U.S. Friday afternoon, an American Airlines flight heading to Chicago made an unexpected landing in Miami after pilots reported problems with its nose gear.

Like in the Ottawa incident, the plane burned off fuel as a precautionary step before touching down safely at Miami International Airport. The plane had 130 people on board. There were no reports of injuries.

With a report from Â鶹ӰÊÓ' Graham Richardson