International airline Virgin Australia has been slammed for a promotional flight around Melbourne on grand final day, tracing the outline of the AFL Premiership cup.

On Sunday, the airline posted a photo mapping the flight out to social media.

The tweet said: “Yesterday during our @AFL Grand Final flyover, we drew a 246km Premiership Cup over Melbourne in our A330 aircraft.”

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A follow-up tweet two hours later still promoted the flight, despite the concerned responses.

“A huge thanks to @AirservicesNews for their help with our @AFL Premiership Cup flight yesterday!” the tweet said.

Twitter was full of angry responses as users questioned the company for a waste of fuel.

Yesterday during our @AFL Grand Final flyover, we drew a 246km Premiership Cup over Melbourne in our A330 aircraft pic.twitter.com/z0DQo3g5S0

— Virgin Australia (@VirginAustralia) October 3, 2015

@VirginAustralia @AFL you didn’t draw anything. U were wasting air services time, fuel, money and creating noise and pollution. — Toby (@OzToby) October 4, 2015

.@VirginAustralia @AFL No one cares or notices. So bad for the environment too — Lotus (@lotus2955) October 4, 2015

According to Fairfax, users on Facebook questioned why the airline didn’t reduce fares to Melbourne for the weekend, instead of wasting money on the pattern flight.